Woman credits a Ruffles potato chip for the discovery of her throat cancer

Dear people who make Ruffles, if this story doesn’t entitle Kristine Moore to a lifetime of your potato chips, we don’t know what would.

It’s not like she hasn’t eaten nearly a lifetime of Ruffles already.

And now one probably saved her life.

“I’ve eaten Ruffles potato chips every day of my life for the past 20 years. It’s a staple of my lunch,” Moore, who lives in Marysville, Wash., told The Herald newspaper in nearby Everett.

But the ones she ate on Feb. 28 were a little different.

Crunch, crunch, crunch, ouch.

A sharp piece of chip poked her in the tonsils.

“I must not have chewed it up enough, because Ruffles have ridges,” Moore told The Herald.

She wasn’t feeling good the next day, and when her husband, Bob Metcalfe, looked in her mouth he saw that her tonsils were inflamed.

A test for strep came back negative, but the doctor who examined her was bothered by what he saw and took a biopsy.

After a CT scan and another biopsy she got the bad news: She has a cancerous tumor, about the size of a quarter, in her throat.

Moore, a smoker, quit right then and there. She said her husband and daughter had nagged her to do it for years. Her mother, a smoker who died last year, had lung cancer.

“The potato chip was a blessing in disguise,” Moore told KIRO 7 News in Seattle. “I probably wouldn’t have found out another year.”

Her husband contacted Frito-Lay, which makes Ruffles, to share her story. The company sent Moore a couple of T-shirts and coupons for free chips.

Moore is scheduled to start chemotherapy and radiation on April 25.

She hopes the treatments don’t make her so sick that she has to rely on a feeding tube because, you know, she has to have her Ruffles.

“I know I shouldn’t eat this many,” she told the TV station, “but I love them.”

This story was originally published April 15, 2016 at 1:50 AM with the headline "Woman credits a Ruffles potato chip for the discovery of her throat cancer."