Christine,

What I meant was that during such procedures, the doctor needs to get at parts of the tongue that are hard to get at. They will put a clamp on the tongue and pull, twist and otherwise manipulate it to give the doctor access. My brother complained more about tongue pain than the actual surgery site mostly from the clamping of the tongue to give the doctor access to the throat.

If this is the case here, she may just have some bruising in areas of the tongue that are healing and lighting up the PET.