Every time Aaron Agler recovered from a sinus infection, it returned. Time after time he visited his doctor for antibiotics, but the infection always came back. “It got to the point where the doctor was like, ‘OK, no more antibiotics.
Something else is going on here,’” Danielle Styer, 31, of Cortland, Ohio, tells TODAY.com. Agler’s various treatment makes it difficult for his voice to carry so Styer, Agler's girlfriend, answers questions for him.
“When he looked in his mouth ...
it looked like the roof of his mouth was heavy, like pushing down.” Eventually Agler, then 27, learned he had nasopharyngeal rhabdomyosarcoma in his sinuses and mouth, a rare soft tissue cancer that normally occurs in children, according to the . “It was a children’s cancer,” Styer says.
“Where it was in Aaron was super rare. It was (located) in prime real estate is what they kept telling us.” On top of having sinus infections that would not subside, Agler, now 34, also “started to snore out of nowhere,” in 2017.
Doctors wondered if he had sleep apnea. Eventually doctors used a scope to examine Agler and found that he had nasopharyngeal rhabdomyosarcoma in February in 2018. Doctors created a treatment plan that included 40 weeks of chemotherapy with six weeks of radiation after the first three months of chemotherapy.
“By fall they said that everything should be fine or should be getting better,” Styer says. “They would have a better idea of what (treatment) should be .