Hi Everybody, this site has been of great help to me in my challenge with oral cancer. I used the thumbs up icon because I wanted to emphasize this is a "Happy" post. I am a healthy, 45 year old female who quit smoking 12 years ago, and my alcoholic beverage intake is limited to the occaisional beer and foo foo drinks on cruise ships. I work as a secretary in the education department of a local hospital.

I discovered a lesion under my tongue in April of 2002. I showed it to my primary care doctor and she referred me to an oral surgeon. The lesion was removed, path came back benign and I went on my merry way. Whew!

In Sept 02, a white line of what looked like scar tissue showed up under my tongue, same spot. I returned to the oral surgeon, he wasn't concerned as the pathology was benign in May, and said to have my dentist keep an eye on it.

Fast forward to January 03, hadn't been to the dentist yet, but spot looked bigger. I was very busy at work, and held off on seeing dentist til I had more free time. In late February and early March, I experienced a very sore tongue. It was a busy time at work, and for four days I talked constantly, irritated the heck out of my tongue and finally made my dental appointment.

My dentist took one look at the spot, and did the oral cancer screening exam he does on every patient. He called the oral surgeon in his building (different doctor from original) and walked me over to see him. I had a biopsy done on the following Monday, March 10th. On Friday the 14th, the pathology came back, squamous cell carcinoma and margins weren't clean. The oral surgeon very compassionately referred me to the ENT group at Kansas University Medical Center. We had plans for a spring break cruise, and took our vacation but called from Miami to set up my appointment with the ENT for the day after we returned from vacation.

All we knew at this point was that I had cancer, and I saw a bunch of scary stuff on the internet, this site included. At the doctor's appointment, my physician was so wonderful. He spent an hour with my husband and myself, and gave me all the information about treatment. Due to tumor size, I was a T1. I had a CT and surgery scheduled two weeks out, for April 14th. The results of the CT enabled the doctor to stage me at Stage 1.

Surgery consisted of a partial glossectomy, modified neck dissectomy and endoscopy. My tongue was grafted with a synthetic material, and a bolster was sewn in for a week to protect the graft. My neck dissectomy removed all the lymph nodes at level 2? a total of 22 nodes. The tongue biopsy came back with clear margins, endoscopy showed no additional trouble spots and the lymph node pathology came back clean.

All in all, I am one lucky girl. Two weeks post op, I am still on full liquids, partial soft diet. I have attempted to eat some things that just didn't work yet due to pain in the floor of my mouth. There are some stitches there that have yet to dissolve. At this point, I return to the Doctor on May 7th. I will not need radiation because the lymph nodes were clear.

This site did a wonderful job of educating me so that I could ask appropriate questions of my physicians. It also gave me a realistic view of what I could expect.

What this site couldn't do is tell me that I would be okay, but hopefully time will do that.

So far, so good!

I hope my story so far will let folks that are in limbo between the diagnosis and treatment stages know that everyone is different, and not all treatment is devastating, and there is hope.

Sincerely,
Lisa in Ks