I think there can be difficulties with diagnosis - my husband had no symptoms whatsoever until he found a lump in his neck. The first specialist did an endoscopy but didn't find anything, and the biopsy was false negative. It wasn't until we went to a surgeon specializing in head/neck cancer, who did another biopsy, and then a radical neck dissection, that the base of the tongue tumour was detected. The surgeon found it by sticking his finger down Gordon's throat and poking around while he was under anaesthesia. What the surgeon found was a hard spot at the base of Gordon's tongue and he took a sample for biopsy. The CT scan done later at the Cancer Clinic still showed nothing. The MRI done after that gave a better indication. All I'm trying to say is that this kind of cancer seems to be easily missed and hard to detect. Sometimes I think it's just the luck of the draw - having the right Dr. at the right time - that it's caught.
Anne