Cancer survivor Rob Giles, an electrical contractor in Kalispell, won’t taste any turkey or pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, but he will give thanks for a blessing most of us take for granted.

“I’m still here,” he said with a smile.

Seven years ago, Giles, who never smoked and doesn’t drink, was diagnosed with a deadly form of throat cancer. As side effects of radical cancer surgery, he takes nourishment through a feeding tube and breathes through a tracheal tube that, along with losing part of his tongue, made speaking a challenge.

“I taught myself to speak in the hospital,” Giles said.

Yet he continues to run a thriving electrical contracting business with 25 employees and enjoy an active lifestyle, including skiing with his wife, Shirley. She feels the same gratitude.

“He had a 75 percent chance of dying,” she said.

Giles received another smaller miracle in this season of Thanksgiving at Kalispell Regional Medical Center. He became the first patient to experience Kalispell Regional Medical Center’s new hyperbaric chamber.

“It’s been a blessing,” he said.

Giles’ oral surgeon prescribed hyperbaric therapy to give his radiation-damaged jaw a healing edge before and after dental surgery. The equipment arrived just in time to save him from traveling to Spokane for six weeks for the treatments.

Best known for treating decompression sickness (the bends) in divers, the hyperbaric chamber creates a therapeutic pressurized environment that forces oxygen into the blood and encourages new vessels to form in damaged tissue.

In Giles’ case, the goal was to grow new blood vessels before oral surgery to replace those destroyed in his jaw during radiation.

“Without blood flow, you don’t get healing,” Shirley said.

His treatment plan called for 20 “dives” (pressurization cycles) prior to having his teeth removed for dentures, then 10 after. Preparing for his seventh treatment, Giles slid into the acrylic cylindrical tube and took a dive to the equivalent of 49 feet below sea level.

Once at a pressure two and a half times that of sea level, he spent 90 minutes reclining on a gel mattress watching news and sports on a flat-screen television mounted above him. Giles said he hears a gentle hum he compares to that inside an airplane.

“It’s very peaceful,” he said. “There’s no pain involved.”

Giles jokes about feeling like a coffee-table book, reposing in the tube with the staff keeping a watchful eye on him from above. He kids Dr. Brent Buchele, director of the center, about avoiding the phrase “fire up” for starting the equipment with a highly combustible environment.

As Giles rested in the hyperbaric chamber having his jaw tissues saturated with oxygen, Shirley recounted his cancer journey that began with a severe earache in late summer 2001.

He went to the emergency room and left with an antibiotic and instructions to see an ear, nose and throat specialist if things didn’t get better.

When he wasn’t better, Giles went to a specialist who suspected cancer when he noted the growth in his throat.

“Sept. 11, 2001, believe it or not, was the day he found out about the type of cancer and the surgery he had to have,” Shirley said. “It’s a date etched in our minds forever.”

Because it was the same type of tumor that his father had died from about a year earlier, Giles, knew the grim statistics of his prognosis. He was also familiar with the radical surgery required to give him a fighting chance to survive.

On Sept. 28, 2001, Giles had the 14-hour surgery at St. Patrick Hospital from an expert in the procedure who recently had moved to Missoula.

“They had to saw his jaw in half and open his face to take out the tumor,” she said.

The surgeon moved a large blood vessel from his arm to create a new artery in his throat. He also took skin from other parts of his body for grafts to patch his throat.

Giles’s grit was apparent from the first procedure.

“He went to hunting camp two weeks later,” Shirley said. “It was rough.”

Over the next year, Giles endured punishing levels of radiation and many rounds of chemotherapy. Shirley called the treatment brutal but the only chance of saving his life.

She ran the business while he was knocked down, but not out, by the chemotherapy. Through it all, she said he was strong and never thought that he wouldn’t beat the cancer.

 “His motto was, ‘No one is going to marry my wife,’” she said with a laugh. “It strengthened our marriage a lot.”

 Beating the odds, Giles recovered but continued to battle some medical issues, particularly in his teeth, from radiation damage. He knew he eventually would lose them.

Continuing to focus on the positive, Shirley said that Giles is excited about having his surgery and getting dentures. She uses the same words as her husband to describe the hospital’s new hyperbaric chamber arriving in their hour of need.

“It’s an absolute blessing — it was an answer to prayers,” Shirley said. “To have this in town is incredible.”

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by e-mail at cchase@dailyinterlake.com.

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