Hello. I just joined this board tonight - although I wish I had found it a month or so ago. I am 29, female and a non-smoker and have been diagnosed with tongue cancer.

I went to the dentist in November and he saw the sores on my tongue (which I took for granted that I was chewing on my tongue at night due to wisdom teeth coming in and moving my other teeth and thought that it would heal once I had them extracted.). The dentist didn't think it would be anything major - but wanted it checked out just to be sure.

Anyway, he sent me to the oral surgeon who thought the sores were not cancer - but definitely thought to biopsy them - and we did all four wisdom teeth extractions at the same time. He also sent me to the ENT for a second opinion before surgery and also my primary care doctor saw them too - no one thought it was cancer.

But - the biospies came back as SCC of the tongue. I had a partial glossectomy and a bilateral neck dissection on January 25th. They removed 20% of my tongue and 22 lymph nodes. None of the lymph nodes had tumor cells in them - but some were as big as 2.5 cm and all but 5 showed hyperplasia in the node. There is also some dysplasia which extended across the border of the incision on the tongue which still remains. The tumor was a stage I/II borderline- which they couldn't tell for sure b/c of multiple centers of loci in the tumor. They did get clean margins though. There was also no vascular or neural spread according to the pathology report.

I am wondering however, due to the size of the lymph nodes and the hyperplasia if there were some tumor cells in there -too few in number for the pathologist to see them on slide.

Also - my neck is still swollen slightly from the neck dissection. It is almost 4 weeks out from surgery - how long does this typically take to go down fully?

THey are doing a PET scan in 4-6 months and I am scared to death that it will be there too. THere are not recommending radiation or chemo at this time. I am worried that by not doing one of those treatments that it will come back. Any thoughts on this?

I am very emotional right now - one day scared that we didn't do everything possible - and the next thankful that I didn't have to do radiation. I don't really know what to think. I have a follow up with the oral surgeon this week to make sure the wisdom teeth are properly healed and I think he wants to see how the surgery went as well.

I got lucky in that eating has almost returned to normal and I could eat pretty quickly after the surgery. I also only have a slight lisp right now - and am pretty understandable. Of course - I really notice the change in speech but most people have no difficulty in understanding what I am saying.

Since I do not know what caused my cancer - I am so scared that it will come back and that I'll have to go through this all over again.

SCC Right Lateral Tongue T2N0M0 Dx 01/12/06, Surgery 01/25/06. Partial Glossectomy, Bilateral Neck Dissection - 22 lymph nodes - all clear. No radiation.