Mouth Punch Biopsy

I still have strange bumps on the roof of my mouth that usually appear while I eat. They are often painful and irritable. They vary in size and hardness but are filled with what seems like salt water. (?)

They're tough to show you, but take my word for it.

So, I was sent to the Ear, Nose & Throat doctor. He, like everyone else, was mystified. If you look carefully at this shot, you can actually see the little opaque bumps up there.

First, he wanted to make sure it wasn't some nasty virus seeping up through my palate into my sinuses or, worse, to my brain. To do this, he had to numb my nose with spray anesthetic and then insert this long-ass tube camera up there. NOT fun.

Yay! No brain virus. But what are they? Me, eager for the upcoming "upper hard palate punch biopsy".

He hole punched out a block of the roof of my mouth about 1 cm cubed.

Then they very dexterously stitched me up with unnecessarily long floss-like thread.

There's the hole.
It healed very quickly and with minimal pain. Unfortunately, the results came back revealing... nothing. It ruled out some specific things (such as GVHD), but did not identify any other causal specifics.
So, he had me come back and do it all again- that time with two bigger punches. Again, the results revealed nothing. He suggested taking yet a bigger piece of my hard palate, this time under full sedation and possibly using a graft of skin from behind my ear if we inadvertently expose the bone (!), but...

My BMT doc seems content to call it GVHD and I suppose I agree. There are countless ways a body can give the finger to its invading graft cells and one of mine is my mouth bumps. My doctor and I hope that it'll just go away when it's ready, but I hope in the meantime to stop the futile steroids that simply are not the right anecdote.

I'm pretty sure all of this is just balancing out for the fact that I've never had any dental work done ever- not even a cavity filled. I now understand the terror trips to see the dentist can elicit in people!