The tender age of 13 is a time when children take their first step toward adulthood. ItÂ’s also a time when anything seems possible and consequences are not yet a priority in making decisions.
Gruen Von Behren probably never could have fathomed that the choice he was about to make one night while camping with friends would have irreversible consequences.
One of GruenÂ’s friends offered him some snuff that night, and he accepted.
“I liked it. I liked the way tobacco made me feel. I liked the way tobacco tasted,” he said.
Chewing tobacco was nothing more than a game at first, Gruen said, a game to see who could fit the biggest chew in their mouth, and who could hold it there the longest. Gruen said that he and his friends would see who would get sick from the tobacco, tease them for getting sick and then entice them to use more.
“Here chew this. Now throw up. Blah,” Gruen said mimicking a puking noise. “Here, chew more, you idiot.”
What started as a game quickly became an addiction, but no one could have known how quickly the addiction would create cancer in GruenÂ’s body.
“Halfway through my junior year of high school, after only using tobacco for three years, I noticed a white spot developing on the side of my tongue where I’d been holding my dip in my lip,” he said. “I thought it was going to go away. Well, in nine months this white spot didn’t go away, and what started out as the size of the tip of a pencil had grown completely through my tongue.
“Cancer split my tongue in half. I could take the tip of my tongue, pull it over and expose the whole tumor,” he said.
Gruen hid the cancer from his mother. At night after his family went to sleep he would look at his tongue in the mirror and talk to God.
“God, why are you doing this to me? I haven’t been a bad kid,” he said. “No worse than Mark or Phil who were also my age and using tobacco. Why is this happening to me, God? Make it go away. I’m scared.”
GruenÂ’s mom began questioning him about his slurred speech, drooling and inability to keep food in his mouth.
“I said, ‘Ah, mom, it’s no big deal. It’s just my wisdom teeth coming in. Once they come through I’ll be fine,’” Gruen said.
Without a doctorÂ’s diagnosis, Gruen knew what he had and knew what had to be done, but fear kept him quiet.
“I was 17 years old, and my tongue was split in half by one of the most deadly diseases known to man. The only way they could fix that was by cutting off half of my tongue,” Gruen said. “The thought of what they were going to do to me during the procedure scared me to death. I was petrified. I was a healthy kid until then. I never had a cavity in my mouth.”
His mom was his best friend, and although he didnÂ’t like lying to her, he thought the truth would hurt her more.
“The thought of having to tell her that I was sick with this disease, and hurting my mother that way — I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I couldn’t hurt my mom.”
The justification that by using tobacco products, the only person being hurt is the user is not true, Gruen said.
“People don’t realize how many people they do hurt when they become sick by something like this,” he said.
GruenÂ’s mom became so concerned about the slurred speech and other problems that Gruen was having that she tricked him into going to the dentist. She still believed that it was his wisdom teeth that were bothering him, but GruenÂ’s secret was about to be exposed.
“One day she said she was going to take me shopping so we hopped into the car, and we were driving down the road and my mom drove right past the mall,” he said. “I said, ‘What are you doing woman? Right there was the mall. Are you losing your mind in your old age?’” However, his mom knew right where she was going.
“She pulled in at the doctor’s office. She pulled into a parking spot, got out of the car and with a tear in her eye she looked at me and said, ‘Damn it, Gruen, I didn’t want to bring you here today. I know you’re slobbering on yourself, you can’t talk, and you can’t eat. I know you’re hurting, son,’” Gruen said.
The appointment was to pull his wisdom teeth, and Gruen had to confess what was really wrong soon after sitting in the dentistÂ’s chair.
“The doctor walked me to my room. He picked up the gas mask. He said five words to me, and here he comes to put me to sleep,” Gruen said. “I said, ‘Wait a minute.’”
Gruen admitted to the dentist and his mother that the problem wasnÂ’t his wisdom teeth, but cancer. It only took a quick look by the dentist to confirm that it was cancer.
“I never saw my mother cry like that,” he said. “Not only had I hurt myself, but I hurt her, too.”
From the beginning, since Gruen had squamous cell carcinoma, he was given a 75 percent chance that the cancer would kill him — not very good odds to a 17-year-old.
People donÂ’t realize how serious oral cancer is, Gruen said. He said to think about how close the mouth is to the spine and the brain.
“Once it hits one of these two places, it’s checkout time,” he said.
The road since the cancer was confirmed has been long and devastating, but Gruen lived through it to tell his tale. In fact, that is exactly what he does now.
Gruen is a national spokesperson for Oral Health AmericaÂ’s National Spit Tobacco Education Program (NSTEP). Oral Health AmericaÂ’s mission is to increase public awareness of oral healthÂ’s importance to total health, and NSTEP was created to educate people about the dangers of spit tobacco use.
“With my job, I travel throughout the United States. I talk to kids. I talk to doctors and lawyers,” Gruen said. “I talk to different professional athletes about the dangers of tobacco use. I do MTV, ESPN, so a lot of very important people take what I have to say to heart.”
Tobacco companies donÂ’t target current users, Gruen said. Current users are already addicted. Tobacco companies are recruiting kids to step up and become their new customers. While there were plenty of messages about how using tobacco was cool, Gruen said that there werenÂ’t messages about the consequences.
“When I was 13 years old and had never used tobacco, nobody showed me a picture of this,” Gruen said indicating toward his face. “Nobody told me that this is what cancer was. Nobody told me that cancer meant 33 surgeries. They didn’t tell me that it meant thousands of treatments.”
Gruen said that he was an innocent kid who was victimized by big tobacco companies. Gruen now uses his experience as a way to reach people and let them know the dangers that tobacco companies seem to omit in their advertisements. After all, death and cancer are not the most attractive selling points.
“Tobacco is the only product in the United States today — the only product that is sold over the counter that if you use it as it is directed to use it, it will kill you.”
Smoking is just as dangerous, Gruen said.
“I know a lot of people who look just like this who smoke.”
GruenÂ’s slurred speech is a constant reminder to him of the price he paid to chew tobacco, but he hopes it will also be a reminder to other people.
“I know that I’m hard to understand. I’ve had 33 surgeries to my mouth and to my neck. They took out half of my tongue because of the cancer that I had. Not everything that I say comes out just how I want it to, and I apologize for that,” he said. “If you listen closely I think you’ll get my message here today.”
Through the surgeries, Gruen has had bone removed from his back and leg as well as muscle from his chest in attempt to help repair some of the damage left by the cancer. In April, he is scheduled for yet another surgery.
Now at 27, Gruen said that he is just an ordinary guy, but his persistence in sharing his story in attempt to help save other people is inspirational. Besides being the national spokesperson for Oral Health America, heÂ’s also recently been contracted out by the NCAA.
Gruen said that he loves to travel and speak to audiences about the dangers of tobacco so that they can make an educated decision.
“If somebody would have come to me when I was 13, looking like this, and told me that tobacco did that to them — I know in my heart I would have taken a different path in life,” he said. Tobacco use and cancer turned out to be his path in life instead, but Gruen hasn’t let it hold him back.
“I don’t really see this as a limitation,” he said. “I really think I took a bad thing and made the best out of it I can.”
Besides educating other people about tobacco, Gruen has also taken time for educating himself. He has a degree in nursing, although considering all the time heÂ’s spent in hospitals from his surgeries, heÂ’s not sure if thatÂ’s something he will pursue further.
For the future, Gruen plans to continue educating people for as long as he can so that other people might not take the same path that he did.
“I’m (traveling) out in America and talk to kids every day because of this — because of the passion and the caring that I have for people. My life has been ruined because of something that I used to put in my lip,” Gruen said. “I put it in my lip because I was so naïve of the dangers. I did not know how dangerous this product was.”
That's why we are all quit and this is not something that is "ok" with moderation.
