By Mark Coddington
mark.coddington@theindependent.com

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Independent/Barrett Stinson While talking to Loup City students about his addiction to chewing tobacco and battle with oral cancer Tuesday afternoon, Gruen Von Behrens told them, ³I want everybody in here to take a good, long look at my face and listen to the way my voice sounds, and I want you to stick that image somewhere in the back of your head.² While his face made an initial impression, Von Behrensı words and personality brought his message home. Independent/Barrett Stinson While telling his story of addiction to chewing tobacco and a battle with oral cancer, Gruen Von Behrens implored Loup City students to remember that itıs whatıs inside thatıs important and lasting. His experience has taught him that you canıt always judge a book by its cover. Click Thumbnails to View

But by the time he was finishing the riveting story of his addiction to chewing tobacco and battle with oral cancer, the students were hanging on Von Behrens' every word.

"I want everybody in here to take a good, long look at my face and listen to the way my voice sounds," he said near the end of his talk. "And I want you to stick that image somewhere in the back of your head."

That was the image he wanted them to see next time they were offered a dip or a smoke.

For Von Behrens, a 30-year-old Illinois native, that first offer of chewing tobacco at age 13 led to 34 surgeries to remove oral cancer and repair the havoc it had wreaked on his face.

His jawbone has been removed replaced with a bone from his lower leg along with all of his teeth and half of his tongue. Much of his face is covered with skin grafts.

Von Behrens is very clear about what left him in this state: tobacco.

He was once a healthy, popular teenager a budding athlete concerned chiefly with "baseball, food and women, in that order."

By his junior year in high school, after three years of using chewing tobacco, a sore in his mouth had taken over much of his mouth. It ate through his tongue, cutting it in half.

He was sure it was cancer but was too afraid and embarrassed to tell his mother. Six days after she finally forced him to see a doctor, he was in his first surgery, a 13-hour operation that removed the tumor but left his face disfigured.

From the first time he looked in the bathroom mirror, he realized he was now one of the people he used to make fun of.

"This isn't a mask I wear," Von Behrens told the middle and high school students gathered in Loup City. "I can't take this off when I go back to my hotel because I'm sick of people staring at me."

Von Behrens spoke in Loup City as part of a two-day trip through Central Nebraska. He also stopped in Hastings and Burwell on Wednesday, and he is scheduled to speak in Broken Bow and Arcadia today.

His tour through the state is funded by seven regional public health departments and Tobacco Free Nebraska.

Mary Drudik, an environmental health nurse with the Loup Basin Public Health Department, said Von Behrens was the first speaker of national stature that her department had ever hosted.

"This has been great for us," she said. "I think it's going to have an exuberant impact."

While Von Behrens' primary message was an anti-tobacco one, he also spoke at length about the importance of looking past others' appearances, being ourselves and appreciating what we have.

He challenged the students to talk to somebody this week to whom they wouldn't otherwise have talked.

And he noted that no matter how much they might complain about the way their hair looks or that zit that just won't go away, the students could get up and walk away after his talk unlike a close friend of his in a wheelchair.

"No matter how bad it gets for you, no matter how bad a hand you think God has dealt you, somebody else is always a lot worse off," he said. "You have no idea how lucky you are."