Tim Retter was 46 years old when he noticed a small pimple next to his ear. It was 2007.
He tried to squeeze it, without success. Instead of disappearing, it grew to the size of a pea, and one morning he woke up with a lump the size of a small ball. He searched online, concluded it was a sebaceous cyst, and carried on with his life as a mechanic in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The lump didn’t stop growing. It went from the size of a racquetball to a tennis ball, eventually becoming a watermelon-sized mass, weighing about 2.2 kg, that hung from his jaw. It gave him daily headaches and, he said, sometimes he felt as if something were “tearing” at his face. He could only eat standing up so the tumor wouldn’t hit the table; getting dressed meant stretching his clothes over the mass, and sleeping was an exercise in balance so it wouldn’t crush his neck. A friend nicknamed him “Little Timmy”.
He couldn’t have surgery: he had no health insurance or savings. Then head and neck surgeon Ryan Osborne contacted him. He suspected the tumor originated in the parotid gland, which produces saliva, and said its size was exceptional: normally, he said, it’s the size of a walnut.
The surgery lasted nearly five hours, and the doctors managed to avoid the facial nerves. Tim woke up able to smile, and the analysis confirmed that the tumor was benign, a pleomorphic adenoma.
Seven weeks later, he shaved for the first time in two decades.