Saskia thought ulcer on the roof of her mouth was harmless

Bored at school, Hobart teen Saskia Rogers ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth and felt a tiny laceration on the roof.
Over the next two years, that little cut would cause the inside of Rogers’ mouth to be torn open in multiple surgeries, rendering her unable to speak or eat for weeks on end while her peers cruelly told her she “deserved” what she got.
But on that chilly June day in 2020 when she first felt it, Rogers deemed the ulcer “inconsequential”.
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“I literally had no idea it was going to completely change my life,” she tells 9honey.
When she was at the GP a few weeks later and mentioned the ulcer she was told it was nothing. When it had grown to the size of a pea a few months later, her GP still didn’t think it was serious.
Even so, they sent Rogers off for a few precautionary scans. All came back clear.
“I was again told it was benign,” Rogers, now 20, says, “it was deemed unnecessary to operate, so they weren’t even going to remove it.”
But the lump got bigger, turned “bright purple” and became so painful it started to affect Rogers’ eating, so in 2021 she sought elective surgery to have it removed.
If she hadn’t, things could have been so much worse.
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Rogers went under the knife in March and the recovery was brutal.
She lost 15 kilos in two weeks on a liquid diet and was in agony, but it wasn’t until a routine follow-up that she learned her ordeal was only just beginning.
During the appointment, her surgeon ducked out of the room to check Rogers’ histology report. He didn’t come back for an age.
“Mum and I were in a room alone for 40 minutes when he realised the results were not as expected,” she recalls.
Unbeknownst to her, the surgeon was making frantic phone calls to two different laboratories to make sure the harrowing results he’d just read were accurate. 
When he came back into the room, only two words registered in Rogers’ mind: “It’s cancer.”
At 17, she was diagnosed with intermediate grade mucoepidermoid carcinoma, a cancer of the salivary glands.
The world seemed to come to a grinding halt around her. Breathing became hard. In the well-lit office, Rogers began to shut down.
“Am I going to die? What about my family? That’s your first thought,” she says.
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Less than 48 hours later, she was undergoing a PET scan to ascertain if the cancer had spread – it hadn’t – and how best to treat it – aggressively.
Rogers would need another major surgery to remove the cancer, leaving her with a hole in the roof of her mouth that went through to the bone, covered by a small plastic plate.
It rendered her unable to communicate for weeks and even after speech therapy, she struggled.
Rogers also experienced more dramatic weight loss and pain so bad that even strong opioids couldn’t provide any relief sometimes, but she felt she had “no choice” but to keep moving forward with treatment.
“Obviously, there’s a lot of panic, there’s a lot of crying [but] you go into survival mode.”
But she never bet on having to survive the vicious mockery of her peers.
When she returned to school after surgery, other students called her attention-seeking and teased her for her speech issues. her friends fell away one by one.
“I was told that I deserved it. I was told I was lucky to have cancer because I lost all this weight in a really short amount of time,” she says.
Rogers was also grieving the future she didn’t know if she’d live to see and her mental health spiralled. Worried, her parents made a life-changing call.
Though their daughter didn’t believe her diagnosis was severe enough for her to deserve specialist support, Rogers’ parents rang Canteen and asked for help.
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The charity, which provides free, tailored support to young Australians impacted by cancer, then called the 17-year-old and she reluctantly agreed to start counselling. It was a game-changer.
“I was able to really talk very honestly about what I had gone through in treatment,” Rogers says, “being able to kind of unpack that for the first time was just invaluable.”
Right before her third and final surgery, she was offered a place in a peer program where she met other young cancer patients and survivors for the first time, many of whom have since become lifelong friends.
“I’d lost a [school] community because of cancer, but I found a family in Canteen.”
Almost two years on from her last surgery, Rogers is 20, cancer free, pursuing a career in nursing, and doing better than ever.
She still carries the weight of what she went through, but today it fuels her advocacy work as a Canteen youth ambassador.
Rogers doesn’t know where she’d be without the charity’s support and doesn’t want any young person affected by cancer to have to go without, so she’s calling on all Aussies to get behind the cause on Canteen’s National Bandanna Day next month.
Saskia is an ambassador for Canteen Australia’s National Bandanna Day on October 24th. More info and donate here.
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