Remember that your doctors are REAL doctors, and I am a science nerd. The reason that they probably didn't go into this in detail with you is that the absolute meaning of it all may still be ambiguous. Also remember that I do not have intimate knowledge of the patient, I do not have a lot of fancy letters after my name (which you have to earn) and they may have particular reasons for not telling you that neither of us are aware of. Most doctors will tell you anything that you really want to know, and if you had pressed them as to the meaning of a P16 issue, they likely would have taken the time to explain it in some form to you. Perhaps even more succinctly than I, and with possibly something more current from the research files.

I am sure that with 35 years of experience, he has forgotten more about this than I will likely ever know.

I just thought that you deserved an answer, and I knew just enough about this to be give you a starting point to form some good questions from it for your doctors.

Please do not walk away from this thinking that I am any kind of "expert" on any of this, I certainly am not. But now you know what I have been taught or read, and there may be much more to this than appears in my previous post.