Tony Scott shares story of his personal battle with throat cancer

HARTFORD, CT — State Rep. Tony Scott, R-Monroe, spoke at Opening Day of the State House of Representatives 2025 Session Wednesday morning, sharing the story of how he battled throat cancer during last election and is still recovering from the grueling rounds of chemo and radiation treatment.

It all began last summer with a sore throat that wouldn’t go away for nearly two months. Scott made numerous doctors’ visits before one physician found three lesions in his throat and immediately knew it was cancer, before a biopsy later confirmed it.

“The good news is I’m on the other side,” Scott said. “December 18 was my last day of my treatment. I am going to be fine.”

Fellow representatives gave Scott a standing ovation in the chamber as his wife, Jennifer, and twin daughters, Addison and Lauren, stood proudly behind him.

“I’ve got to put some weight on and I will do that,” Scott said. “The purpose for me speaking today is not for tears. It’s not for sadness for me. I’m on the other side to be perfectly clear. I did it for these ladies behind me.”

Scott’s love for his family motivated him to get to the bottom of the cause of his sore throat, then to take on the grueling journey to recovery.

He said he wanted to see his daughters graduate from high school, go to college and all of the amazing things they will do when they grow up, and to travel to places he and his wife always wanted to see.

“They gave me a reason to fight and go and get healthy,” Scott said.

“Again, no tears for me and no sadness,” he said. “The message to you all in this chamber and watching TV is go be your advocate. If there’s something wrong with you and you’re not perfectly right right now, don’t wait.”

“I only waited a couple months. I caught it early. I have a great prognosis,” Scott continued. “But it could have been different. It could have been massively different. I could have waited six months, a year. So be your own advocate, get those answers you need right away and go get that treatment done.”

Scott encouraged everyone finding themselves in his situation to find something worth fighting for like he did with his family. Scott said one of his goals was to be at Opening Day Wednesday, adding he is happy he fought to get there.

“Today is not about sadness,” he said. “Today is to celebrate. It is a fun day. Let’s have a good time. Tomorrow, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.”

During an interview with The Sun last Friday, Scott said he is interested in how the legislature can help patients and improve Connecticut’s health care system, from ensuring everyone has health insurance, regardless of their income, to providing incentives to attract more nurses to work and stay in the state.

A lingering sore throat

Last summer, Tony Scott had a sore throat that wouldn’t go away. This dragged on for six to eight weeks. Scott said his throat wasn’t too bad, but the soreness was enough to be irritating.

He went to an urgent care. “They were no help to be honest and then I started going around to see other doctors,” Scott recalled.

Scott said he is in tune with his body and knew something was wrong. Finally an ear, nose and throat (ENT) doctor examined Scott’s throat and his symptoms.

“I think he kind of knew right away what it was,” he said. “I think he had an idea immediately where it was, so he sent me for a CAT scan.”

After the results came in, the doctor told him he had three lesions, two in his neck and one in his throat.

“He looked at me and he said, ‘Tony, I can’t tell you that you have cancer, but you have cancer,'” Scott said of hearing the bad news.

A biopsy would have to be done to confirm it, but from his experience, Scott’s doctor knew the result would be positive.

Doctors tried a procedure called a fine needle aspiration, in which a needle in the neck extracts a sample of liquid to test. But the sample size was too small. Sc0tt was referred to an oncologist specializing in the head and neck area, who determined a surgery was needed to do the biopsy.

“I’m 48-years-old and I’ve never had surgery, but he’s like this is real,” Scott said.

The biopsy was performed at the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale New Haven Health on Sept. 25. The surgeon went in through Scott’s throat. Scott said the cancer was in a difficult spot, in a tonsil and two of his lymph nodes.

When Scott was going under anesthesia, his surgeon told him there was a possibility he could wake up without his left tonsil. But he managed to get a large enough sample without doing that.

Scott officially learned he had throat cancer that morning. Thoughts of the worst outcome crossed his mind, but his doctors told him he had a very curable form of cancer, especially for someone his age and physical condition.

“It was a 90 to 95 percent cure rate prognosis,” Scott said, adding his oncologist and his team told him it was the best form of cancer he could have because it is very curable.

“The only problem is the path to get there is not easy,” Scott said. “The treatment is brutal and that’s what I’ve been going through the last few months. But at that moment in time I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I was like, ‘okay, so I’m not fighting for my life today anymore.'”

Scott said his cancer was “barely stage two,” so the prognosis was high, especially because he is not a smoker.

Though doctors telling him he had cancer ahead of time made him mentally prepared, Scott said, “it’s still scary.”

A private battle

Scott began his cancer treatments on Oct. 30, amid a contested election for his 112th District seat, but after many talks with his wife, Jennifer, he chose not to go public about it during his campaign.

Scott said he wasn’t worried he would lose his election, but he still didn’t want anyone to decide not to vote for him out of concern for his health and he also didn’t want any votes from people just because they felt sorry for him. Rather, he wanted the election to be about his record in Hartford and his opponent’s proposals.

If he chose to tell people about his diagnosis, Scott also said he would constantly be asked how he was feeling at every event he attended, which would be “draining.”

“I’ve been working the whole time through,” he said. “I never took a day off well through the treatments, because I needed to get my mind off it. I don’t want every day, every conversation I have, every text I get, to be ‘how are you feeling today,’ so I didn’t tell a lot of people.”

Among the events Scott attended was Think Pink Monroe’s Think Pink Palooza. He spoke without mentioning his own diagnosis.

On Election Day, Scott voted in the morning before going for radiation at 8:45 a.m., then for chemo at 9 a.m. That lasts three to four hours, so he said he was finally able to talk to constituents at the polls around 1 p.m.

Scott said his doctors prepared him well for what was ahead. The first rounds of radiation and chemo were easier, but it is a cumulative effect. By the third or fourth week he “hit a wall” and by the seventh week he felt drained.

A steak dinner

Scott sat on the end of a couch in the living room of his Monroe home last Friday afternoon. His rounds of chemo and radiation treatments were behind him and his cancer was gone. Now the legislator is recovering, rebuilding his strength and stamina and trying to get his appetite back.

An open container of Ensure was on an end table nearby. Daily radiation treatments eventually shut down one’s salivary glands, which helps with swallowing and breaking down food. Scott also temporarily lost his taste buds at a time when eating is important to a complete recovery.

“My taste buds are gone. I have no taste buds,” he said. “Everything tastes like chalk.”

Scott glanced over at a newspaper by his fireplace. “That’s what it tastes like. Everything you give me, it would taste like newspaper. It tastes like cardboard,” he said of different foods. “It’s not appetizing. I don’t really have that big of an appetite.”

As a result, Scott lost 35 pounds since the start of his treatment on Oct. 30.

“But the last 10 days I flatlined. I haven’t lost any weight, which is great,” he said. “I think I’ve hit rock bottom and it’s a matter of time until I get those glands back, I get those taste buds back.”

Scott said he and his family are hoping that will happen by mid- to late January.

“I’m craving food just to get my energy up,” he said. “I’m lacking energy. If you told me to go run around the block, I wouldn’t do it right now.”

Now that he has a clean bill of health, Scott said he looks forward to the rapid period of recovery when he’s more physically active and able to taste food again.

“I want a steak man. Yeah, I think about the next meal,” he said. “You appreciate the simple things. I mean, like just having a steak at dinner or having a glass of wine.”

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