Oral Cancer Foundation

Listen to our latest podcast featuring Roseann Murphy talking about her mom's battle with oral cancer and the fundraiser in memory of her.

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0cBqqFETr0CXtWhkb9P1dh?si=EcjypshmSzOk4_Yz6TJvjA

Event Info:
https://tinyurl.com/2ex2xbz7

In Memoriam: Brian Hill
Co-Founder of the Oral Cancer Foundation and a Lifelong Advocate for Patients, Survivors, and Families

“Brian believed no one should face oral cancer alone. His legacy will live on through the lives he touched, the community he built, and the mission that continues in his honor.”

The Oral Cancer Foundation mourns the passing of Brian Hill, our co-founder and a tireless advocate for patients, survivors, and families affected by oral cancer.

Together with his late wife, Ingrid Hill, Brian founded the Oral Cancer Foundation with a mission grounded in compassion, education, advocacy, and support. What began as a deeply personal commitment grew into a lasting source of hope and guidance for countless individuals navigating one of life’s most difficult challenges.

Brian devoted much of his life to ensuring that people affected by oral cancer would never have to face the disease alone. Through the online support community at oralcancersupport.org, he helped create a trusted space where patients and caregivers could ask questions, share experiences, find encouragement, and connect with others who truly understood what they were going through. For many, that community became a lifeline.

His work was defined not only by dedication but by humanity. Brian understood that oral cancer affects far more than just physical health. He recognized the fear, uncertainty, and emotional burden that often come with diagnosis and treatment, and he gave his time, energy, and heart to helping others move through those realities with dignity and support.

Brian’s legacy lives on in the foundation he helped build, in the community he helped foster, and in the many lives he touched through his kindness, leadership, and unwavering service. His contributions to the oral cancer community will continue to be felt for years to come.

In honor of Brian’s life and mission, Chester Deitz will continue leading the foundation forward, building on the work Brian began with renewed dedication to expanding research funding, increasing public awareness through community walks, and developing patient materials for those affected by oral cancer. This continued commitment reflects the values Brian championed and ensures that his vision for education, support, and advocacy will endure.

We extend our deepest condolences to all who knew and loved Brian. We honor his life with profound gratitude and remain committed to carrying forward the mission he helped create.

Brian Hill will be remembered with respect, admiration, and lasting appreciation for the difference he made in the lives of so many. His legacy will endure through every patient supported, every family informed, and every step taken in the fight against oral cancer.

Thank you for your continued support of public education and published research.

Ingrid Hill, my wife of almost 40 loving and wonderful years, died suddenly and unexpectedly on April 1, 2024. Even today as I write this to inform people, I do so through constant tears, as I am days later, still in unbelieving shock of her passing. She was found on our kitchen floor by a neighbor, most likely the result of a sudden coronary or cerebral event. Given her life of healthy living, exercising, and eating, I am having a hard time accepting that these kinds of things happen to even the healthiest of individuals.

She was a woman of extraordinary compassion for others, and loved her work at the Oral Cancer Foundation which she cofounded with me in 1999 right after I came out of cancer treatment at MDACC. I don’t think that I would have survived those months of treatment and complications were it not for her support and constant care. I’m a terrible patient. She particularly liked helping the many family members or current patients of this same cancer who contacted OCF on the phone, and the many years as caretaker to me through more surgeries and treatments after my initial diagnosis plagued my life, gave her a wealth of practical advice and knowledge about the disease and coping with treatment side effects. She was very well versed and experienced to help them. Of course, she was also the backbone of the financial aspects of OCF, and a core part of the support team working directly with the many volunteers that help the foundation put on awareness/walk events around the country each year.

We met when we were both employed at a dental implant company in the earliest years of those becoming accepted treatment modalities. Meeting her I knew immediately that she would be part of my future life. She was a rare mixture of beauty, intelligence, emotional strengths and understandings, and a person who saw the good in everything. I fell short of equaling her in many of these areas. We became immediately inseparable and lived together for a few years before tying the knot. I decided to spin off from that company and start my own implant company, and Ingrid readily came with me to help run the new venture. We sold that implant company 7 years after starting it to a big pharma company. When the auditors came in to go over the operational, financial, and FDA records, they said they had never seen a company so well organized and documented. That was all her, not me.

She was adventurous, and things that dominated my personal life she quickly adapted to and made her own. Becoming a pilot, a certified SCUBA dive master, rock climber, skier of runs that I even shied away from, and so much more. She had no fear and would try anything, excelling and mastering it. On a cold very early morning, riding our two Harleys back to SoCal from Mammoth Mountain in Northern California on a deserted straight highway, I decided to roll on the throttle. I wanted to see what she would do. Speed increased past 100, hit 120 and still climbing, and there she was on her Harley right next to me calm and relaxed. She never would back down, and if I had kept increasing speed, I knew she would not slow down or back off. That’s the way she approached life. There was little that she would not try. There was little she did not conquer and master. We both loved flying, and aerobatics in particular. She would do spins until I was beyond any desire to do more. Throttling back to idle, letting a wing drop until the plane flipped over on its back and started spiraling around and around towards the ground. Then calmly entering the right control inputs to set things straight again, returning to normal flight.

When we were at OCF fundraisers with lots of A-list celebrities, she chatted with them as if they were old friends and had an encyclopedic knowledge of their lives and work in movies, stage, and other media that she prepped for. She easily won them over. Unlike me, she dressed the part of wherever she was. With them, she looked and spoke like them, and then there was me, the brown shoes at a formal event. She was a sight to behold. Drop dead gorgeous, but equally socially adept and comfortable. And she was all mine to be proud of. She attended tons of my lectures at universities around the country. She could do my technical science presentations after hearing them so many times as well as I could. She was a sponge for information. I often wondered how I was so lucky to have convinced her to marry me.

I could write a book about her, as there were so many facets to her life and experiences. But the most important thing was that she loved me unconditionally, and I can be a hard person to love at times. I have my passions and drives, and they can often take precedent in my life. But she always had my back, even if she thought I was off on a tangent. That is what loving partnerships are all about, and she epitomized the best of the possibilities. Her loss is leaving me feeling very alone, as the one constant in my adult life, my one completely safe place to be, the one who taught me what true love really is, she is now gone and absent from my world. I feel so alone now, absent her unwavering presence.

She was a rare and extraordinary spirit. A soul much more evolved than I, that understood her place and time in the universe. Now the atoms that spun around for an instant on the infinite timeline, that made up the blood and bones and sinew of the woman we knew as Ingrid, are disbanding and returning to the stars and seas from which they were born. While we all know this life will end, the suddenness of her departure is extremely painful. No time to prepare for the impeding, no warning that something was amiss. In the blink of an eye, she is gone. I know she had many friends via the foundation and personally. If you would like to know anything more, please feel free to reach out to me at my OCF address. She will be cremated this weekend, and her ashes scattered in a favorite place, where in my loneliness I might go and be able to talk to her. Lord knows there is much left unsaid, and I need to say the things to her which I did not get the opportunity to in life. Selfishly, going there and talking might eventually ease this huge emptiness that I feel, though I suspect it will always be a part of who I am now. I will wear her wedding band around my neck with a small vial of her ashes till my last day.

I hope you all remember her kindly, and know that she loved you all as well, and her work with many of you. In lieu of sending flowers, she and I would welcome donations in her memory to OCF, that the work she loved so dearly may carry on. Brian Hill

Home OCF funds life-saving research and work that elucidates mechanisms for early discovery and furthers disease understanding. We provide direct peer to peer support for oral cancer patients and their caregivers. We disseminate vetted professional and public information on oral and oropharyngeal cancer,...

April 1st kicks off Oral Cancer Awareness Month!
I invite my entire FB community of friends and professionals to change your profile picture to the burgundy oral cancer picture you see here for the month of April. This is OCF's 6th year of asking for this simple effort, and each year hundreds more join with us. We hope that April this year sets new records. If you are a patient, a survivor, a caregiver-family member, you know personally how important this raising visibility of our cancer is. You know the physical and emotional pain this disease can bring into not just the patients world, but the entire family’s life. If you are a dental professional, a CDT, an RDH, an assistant… this is your profession's cancer. The American public counts on you to be the early discovery mechanism that will save their lives. I ask you to join the fight with full hearts to raise national awareness of a too often overlooked disease by turning Facebook burgundy for April.

OCF represents a disease that the American public is still very unaware of. That means that they do not know the risk factors which lead to it, some of which are avoidable; nor the signs and symptoms of it developing in themselves, which would facilitate self-referral to an appropriate medical or dental professional for diagnosis. Oral and oropharyngeal cancers are still found as a late stage disease the majority of the time because of this lack of awareness, and the lack of a national effort to engage in annual screenings. To those who will be touched by oral cancer, late staging at the time of discovery means significantly worse treatment related morbidity, and worse long-term outcomes. This cancer kills more individuals as a percentage of those that get it than cancers we hear about everyday. The treatments are brutal, and it destroys far too many lives each year. We must join together and give oral cancer a voice in order to save lives! The awareness of this disease must be increased. It’s only 30 days, and if your burgundy picture’s message impacts just one person in your circle of Facebook friends, if your friends copy your effort, it will potentially change someone’s life. Become Burgundy for April.

If you wish to go a step further, please send an email to those professionals you know and your friends asking them to join you in this simple effort by changing their picture for April. The future is not written in stone. The deadly statistics can be altered. Please join with those of us at the Oral Cancer Foundation in this simple effort to raise awareness.