Thanks for the thoughts and advice. I had the biopsy collected today. It turned out to be by fine-needle, which is nicer than the core needle (I'm assuming). They gave me a numbing (called freezing here in Canada, eh?!) shot which was very effective and I hardly felt the rest of the procedure, which involved inserting five different needles in sequence through the same spot on my neck but targeting five different areas in my neck, then wiggling the needle around while extracting cells from each location. I was told it shouldn't be painful as the freezing wears off, but I might end up with a bruise. So far so good.

Unfortunately I won't learn the results for most of a week, until next Thursday (it's a long weekend here), so now we're left hanging fire, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and just generally mixing metaphors to pass the time.