Hi and welcome to OCF.
The mass is something. Pain and vomiting are not symptoms we would expect from cancer. The ENT will tell you, but I warn you, whatever it is, he's not going to say "yep thats cancer". Even if he does suspect it is, he will order a series of tests to confirm the type and staging. They do that to tailor the most effective treatment. He'll probably do some kind of biopsy, which is the definitive way to diagnose cancer.
Hopefully its nothing of course. But if it is nothing you've at least learned a couple of things. Firstly Google is a great tool, if you ask the right questions. Right now you don't want to know if he has cancer, what type, what treatment. What you really want to know before anything else is "will he die from this". So you go looking at stats and survival rates etc. As you've found, without knowing what sort of cancer, what stage, what risk factors etc, all you can punch in is the worst case numbers. So you end up scaring yourself silly and making it all worse.
What Google is good for is helping you understand the torrent of new information the doctors pass on to you in the limited time they have with you. Say the doctor puts him on Cisplatin chemo, you can Google "Cisplatin side effects" and you can come up with more informed questions next time you see the doctor. Of course Google is how you found OCF, so its not all bad.
The other thing I hope you take away from this exercise, is that when you have a serious complex illness like cancer or multiple sclerosis or ALS, there is no single appointment with the doctor where its all over. There is always another step. The next appointment, the next test, the next treatment, the next follow up check. If you were as crazy as you are at the moment (we all were, trust me) all the waiting would drive you nuts. If there's one thing I've picked up in this little adventure, is that you need to live life in between appointments. No matter how sick you are or how bleak the prospects, you can always milk some good out of every day you are here.
Again, we hope its nothing, but we're here if its not. Let us know how he goes.
