Hi Jeffery,

Welcome! Your question is in an area that I like to play with a bit.
First, congratulations on your 2 year mark.

I have a bit of a pet peeve with statistics. When you are the cancer patient the statistics loose most of their value. For example how will you live 85%? Any one person either gets 100% or they get the 0%!
The statistics for cancer survival are generally based on large pools of patients with a broad range of treatments and tumor characteristics. from there you can derive an average survival number (or many subsets of numbers for various stages). It is interesting if you like statistics or if you want to do reaserch on a particular cancer or treatment but not very usefull if your thinking about yourself. You can become overly depressed if you have bad numbers or you could become overly confident if you have good numbers. The real deal is nobody knows for sure what your numbers are! Just as I don't know what my numbers are. (this is true for the cancer and true for all the unknown things that may happen to me in the next seconds, minutes, hours, days, years.)
In my case the doctors disagreed on survival. They both agreed that it was 50% if I had surgery alone, but the ENT surgeon said 75% with radiation and the Radiation Oncologist said 95%
Of course this means I bring flowers to the Rad. Doc. every day and nothing to the ENT. confused Actually I try to ignore all those numbers.

Once again, I really only want 100% survival.

So far that is what you have gotten. smile don't worry be happy.


Mark, 21 Year survivor, SCC right tonsil, 3 nodes positive, one with extra-capsular spread. I never asked what stage (would have scared me anyway) Right side tonsillectomy, radical neck dissection right side, maximum radiation to both sides, no chemo, no PEG, age 40 when diagnosed.