Hello from Colorado!

I look forward to reading some of the posts here.

I am not an oral cancer patient, but I have long been plagued with severe and long-standing (25 years) actinic cheilitis on my lower lip, a result of hundreds of hours in the sun as an avid tennis player in my younger years. I have also had twelve skin cancers removed from my face (basal cell carcinomas), including eight Mohs surgeries. Both my nose and one of my eyelids are somewhat disfigured from surgeries performed.

Lower-lip actinic cheilitis is considered precancerous, turning into invasive squamous cell carcinoma perhaps ten percent of the time (statistics vary), a high enough incidence to keep me concerned, anyway.

At the recommendation of my current dermatologist, I recently underwent a laser-CO2 ablation procedure that seems to have rid my lip of the actinic cheilitis. However, I still do experience vague, mild pain in that region of the lip where the severest cheilitis was and i can now feel a very small, hard lump directly below that area as well, which is of concern to me. And I'm not sure i trust the dermatologist to be able to identify a very early SCC. To be blunt, I don't think most of these guys are capable of detecting SCCs of the lip until they become obvious, ulcerated masses and, by that time, I would think such SCCs have probably already started to become invasive.

So at the moment, I'm thinking about visiting an NCI-designated comprehensive cancer center to have them look things over and give me a path to getting a definitive answer as to what the small lump is.

Has anyone here had lip cancer?