I agree that a positive attitude is a HUGE part of healing. Life is worth enjoying!

I'll try to give the medical information that I can, but I was only 15 when my mom had the first round of cancer treatment, and away at college when it reoccured - so I haven' been involved in much of the medical side.

Her main inital complaint was a sore throat that wouldn't go away, which unfortunately occured during the end of winter cold season/beginning of spring allergy season period. Eventually, though, she got herself to an Oto specialist and scoped, and they found her tumor. I don't know specifics of her surgery, but they removed the tumor from her tongue, which had spread a little bit onto her motor nerve, but not her sensory nerve. I don't know whether or not lymph nodes were involved. She then had 6 or so weeks of radiation. She was on a feeding tube for about 6 months, but very eager to get off it. We discovered fine meals at nice restaurants and decadent chocolate desserts were the easiest to swallow. (if you need ideas of good foods to swallow, we have quite a list going).

For the next 5 years she lived almost completely normally - aside from some eating/talking/dry mouth side effects, mostly from radiation scar tissue. She went back to teaching and working full time. I believe she had chest x-rays every 6 months (might've been yearly after a few years) and occasional MRIs. After almost exactly 5 years, a chest x-ray showed up positive for metastises in her lungs. However, they were very small and slow growing, so the decision was made to monitor but not to treat them until they became a problem or started growing rapidly. She continued to live normally for the next 2 years. This fall, however, she started coughing and having other breathing problems. She started a round of chemo in Oct (don't know the names of the drugs off the top of my head). The long and short of the chemo is that the tumors stopped growing, but didn't shrink, despite the 3 different drug cocktails they tried. Because ACC (or at least her tumors) were so slow growing, she had treatments every 3 weeks. Each treatment meant she felt like crap for about a week, then had 2 weeks to recover, regain weight, feel good about life again. They also gave her "time off" around the holidays so she didn't have to feel "chemo-ed" when the family got together. Now she's about 4 weeks post-chemo and feeling great, relatively speaking.

Hope that helps. And that your post-treatment recovery is going well! Is life moving back towards "normal" for you?