Patty,

First sorry to hear about your father-in-law and welcome to this forum, hopefully at least you can find moral support and kinship for the issues you have to deal with.

As Anita and Mandi mentioned, most of us here are dealing with squamus cell carcinoma as it is the most prevalent form of oral cancer.

That having been said, the best I can offer is my personal experience with scc and oral cancer, and my experience with my first wife who had malignant melanoma. Please understand, what I'm going to offer is a combination of the two experiences and is more anectdotal than based on medical training. Also, my experience with malignant melanoma was 10 years ago, and I'm sure there have been advances in treatment since then.

I would suspect the doctors treat this in two stages, first as any oral cancer would be treated with the surgery to the oral cavity and radical neck disection.

After that, depending on the pathology results, there may be a follow up with radiation and chemotherapy. This would be where the treatment differs. SCC is mostly treated with Cisplatin or Taxol. There are other chemo drugs in use for oral cancer and scc, but those are the ones I've seen mentioned the most. These are mostly used to help the radiation do it's job and not to cure the cancer on their own.

Malignant melonoma is treated with a different series of chemo drugs, tomoxifin (sp) being one of them, and the side effects of the chemo tends to be more severe. Reason for the severe side effects is this "cocktail" of drugs is supposed to be able to kill the cancer cells without the need for radiation. However, if the cancer is localized, still in the head and neck area, the oncologist will probably suggest radiation in addition to the chemo.

What I would do is badger the docs until you are satisfied with the information you get. They probably aren't going to give you percent chances of survival or not, mostly because they probably just don't know.

Hope this help at least a little. Guess the best thing is to research about the melanoma, then the oral cancer. You've probably come to the best resource on the oral cancer there is.
Bob S.