Hi, Sarge. Oh, such bad luck for it to have come back so fast. I had more or less the same as you - probably they took very slightly less of my tongue away, but a solid quantity - the scar on my wrist is about that size, yeah... OK: the trach doesn't hurt and is not unpleasant as such. The difficult bit is when they clean it. You have to keep your cool. It can be hard. (I think the worst bit for me was that for the first - 4 days, I think it was - I had a trach that didn't let me speak. So there you are, distressed, feeble, in intensive care, etc. - and you can't even ask questions or for help or whatever. I had a little blackboard to write on, but they kept forgetting to leave me the crayon to write with!). The bit that hurt was the thigh, where they take the skin graft, and the wrist was unpleasant too. All the neck and tongue was really not bad!

So it is heavy duty stuff you are going through, but you are young and have a sense of humour - v. important! It's a shame you had already lost so much weight - comes off so much quicker than it goes back on - don't be impatient afterwards, keep the tube in as long as necessary (and it sounds like they fitted your first one really badly - if that happened again, you'd need to bang tables to get them to fix it, I think!). I had mine for about 6 months, I think. You really must get re-education afterwards, good therapy there can so help speed up the process of being able to eat again.

There will be stages you go through during your recuperation that will be more or less easy to handle, particularly the side-effects of the more extensive radiotherapy you willhave now - it affects the saliva glands, and that can be unpleasant. It also affects your sense of taste and smell (specially if you also have chemo), which doesn't help the old eating, either! But I can assure you that a year after the op, I was fit and healthy and bouncy (although I still needed to put more weight on, that was a slow process).

I wish you all the best of luck.