Tony Gwynn Recovering Well From Surgery

I constructed that confusing headline on purpose so that I would have an easy introduction for this post. This is a post about Tony Gwynn's recent operation to remove a cancerous tumor from his mouth. Did the operation leave Tony Gwynn speaking in the third person? No, of course not, that wouldn't make any sense. Tony has a brother named Chris, and Chris talked about Tony's recovery. Larry Stone:

"He's doing great,'' Chris said. "I talked to him yesterday for about an hour. He's at home. The surgery was 14 hours, and they got all the work done, all the cancer out. Everybody I've talked to who's seen him says he looks normal. I've talked to him, and he sounds like before he went in. He's ticked off because his Aztecs are 1-3. So he's obviously healthy."

All good signs, obviously, and while it's still too early to say for absolute certain that Tony will come out of this just fine, it's looking like Tony will come out of this just fine. The world just lost one beloved Hall of Famer, so it's fantastic news to hear that another is on the mend from a frightening situation.

"The surgery was 14 hours." Just making sure you caught that. Think about how long 14 hours is. Now double that because you probably didn't think about it enough.

Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn had a malignant tumor in his right cheek, attributed at least in part to the long-term use of smokeless tobacco during his playing career (though at least one of Gwynn’s former doctors claims there is no such link).

On Wednesday, following 14 hours of surgery, Gwynn was awake and drinking water and laughing, according to ESPN.com:

According to Gwynn’s wife, Alicia, the doctors performed a complex nerve-graft procedure, removing Gwynn’s facial nerve and replacing it with a nerve from Gwynn’s shoulder.

“All is well — it doesn’t seem like last time,” Alicia Gwynn said from the Thornton Hospital at the University of California San Diego. “It turned out great. He looks good, he looks normal. His eyelids are a little swollen, but they got all the cancer. They say they got it all. His face looks good. They did an amazing job.”

The surgery was intricate and not without high risk. If the nerve graft did not go well, Alicia Gwynn said, her husband’s face could have been partially paralyzed or slightly disfigured.

This is very good news for the former Padres star, who is now the baseball coach at San Diego State University. According to the article, Alicia Gwynn believes that her husband can go back to work there in about a month.

This story is a good cautionary tale about the dangers of smokeless tobacco:

Tony Gwynn said he used smokeless tobacco inside his right cheek during his entire 20-year career with the San Diego Padres, and for another decade following that.

“I’m addicted,” he previously has said of his habit.