Hi everyone! I should introduce myself in this post.
My mom was recently diagnosed with base of tongue carcinoma at the age of 52 and my family's world has been turned completely upside down.
I'll try to go through the big steps so far. She had the very severe mandibular swing surgery in November along with a radical neck dissection on her right and selective neck dissection on her left. Considering how brutal that surgery is she has made a great recovery. Even the doctors were impressed at how quickly she bounced back (spent 2 weeks total in hospital, she has good swallowing function and talks clearly). After surgery the pathology reports came in and here's where thing get very grim.

Surgery had clear margins, no cancer found in the left side of the neck. Right side showed several conglomarated nodes (matted) with the greatest in diameter being 2.5 cm. Tumour on base of tongue was 3cm in greatest diameter. Signs of perineural invasion. Nothing reported on extranodal extension. At first her staging mentioned T2N2bM0 but this was later crossed out with a pencil (yes.... a pencil) and replaced with T2N3M0 (i guess because of the matted nodes) The doctor was very vague in his prognosis, he didn't give her any stats or number he just said the next step is chemo radiotherapy and he said the goal is still curative in mind. I had to go through her pathology report myself and read a hundred studies on pubmed to realize the severity of her prognosis. I live in Croatia and the hospital system here is extremely slow so we're STILL waiting on confirmation that the tumour was HPV+ (yep, surgery was in November 2017, report still not done yet).

Basically from what I've read my mom's chances.... aren't the best. Can any of you please tell me more? I feel myself completely losing hope and I'm already fearing the worst about my mom whom I love immensely. Is there still some hope for her left? She should be starting her chemoradiation sometimes next week.

I'm studying and working in a neighboring country so I can't be with her as she goes through her next brutal ordeal. Currently she feels fine and healthy and has a big positive attitude about this (like I said before the doctors were very vague about her chances, in fact no one in my family knows how severe this probably is because they didn't bother to read so much about it). I call her on the phone every day and it's becoming soul crushing to keep up a happy voice around her.

Could you please give me some advice how to cope and deal with all this? Am I going to lose my mom?