Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Yakima Radio: Former Personality Fighting Oral Cancer

JB Baker
The gift of gab was never something Joel “JB” Baker took for granted. But when his body began to rob him of his voice, the radio disc jockey’s life changed drastically.

According to dailyinterlake.com, Baker was working for Country KXDD 104.1 FM, a country music station in Yakima, Wash., before oral cancer surgery cost him his job and his ability to speak. Since he was a little boy, being a radio DJ was Baker’s dream, but that may have been cut short by disease.

The 47-year-old is still in a Seattle hospital recovering from a Jan. 3 procedure that removed his tongue and replaced it with a muscle graft from his left thigh to help avoid suffocation.

“We’re all alive, so we’ve got that going,” she said. “It was a nine-and-a-half-hour surgery. It was a long one. We can’t say [the cancer] is all gone, but the doctors think they got it all.”

In 2003, Baker’s dentist noticed a strange spot on his tongue and sent him to get it checked out. That was his first bout with oral cancer, an unusual occurrence for a man who never smoked or chewed tobacco and drank only occasionally. A little over 18 months ago, the first surgery removed half his tongue with the cancer that was on it.

For a man who made his living off of his ability to talk, it is frustrating for Baker not to be able to communicate easily. His wife said he can get down sometimes, but has been reading his Bible and thinking of his kids more often.

“It’s never going to be normal again. It’s a new normal,” Kelly said. “Everything will be all right. We’ll be all right.”

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