Post Op News

I got my stitches removed today--it's very nice to be foreign-object free again.

The doctor also had the results of the tests conducted on the lymph nodes they removed from my neck.

Overall, they removed 19 lymph nodes. Of those 19, one of them came back positive for cancer. The tumor itself was very small--only about 1 cm wide--but the ramifications are pretty big. The details still need to be worked out next week when I speak with my radiation oncologist, but it appears that I will be undergoing radiation treatment with a small dose of chemo mixed in to boost the effects of the radiation. Of course I would rather go to Hawaii, but since they didn't offer that as an option, I think I'm stuck with radiation. Oh well. The treatment will most likely start in 4-6 weeks or as soon as my neck is healed from the surgery that I had last week. As of right now, the doctors are not sure whether they will incorporate a shot of radiation to the tongue while they are irradiating my neck. The thought generally is, "Well, we are going to the trouble of doing all this, why not get the tongue at the same time?" It makes sense, but obviously I would prefer to avoid radiation to the tongue if it isn't necessary. The key is to guess how the cancer will act...if I were a cancer cell...where would I go??? You get the idea.

So that'll happen relatively soon and then hopefully I'll be done with this.

The important thing to remember in all of this is that these results are not unexpected. I was actually not surprised at all to hear that one of the nodes came back positive. It would have been a shortcut if nothing had been positive, which would have been nice, but wasn't to be this time.

Another important thing to remember is that we caught this thing early. It does nothing but boosts my chances of getting this thing taken care of once and for all by catching it early.

I suppose I will offer more editorials on the matter as time goes on, but right now, I don't really feel obliged to.