Thanks, I have an appointment scheduled with an ENT physician this Thursday - most of his practice is head and neck CA. He may be more likely to biopsy anything he finds suspicious. The problem, as I see it, is that in a majority of cases on this board - unless there is an enlarged lymph node, there is often nothing to biopsy inside the mouth or tongue - especially for HPV+ tumors which tend to hide deep inside the tongue or tonsils, not visible to the eye. Brian wrote to me that of the many hundreds of cases very very few are diagnosed in stage 1 or 2.

So many members on this board had initial negative scopes and biopsies till they started to have enlarged nodes and then were found to have SCC when the node was sampled.

This cancer is one wily sucker. Also, my Oral HPV test will also come back this Thursday, not that I am going to put a lot of weight into it, unless it is positive, in which case, will have to go for the whole hog - biopsy, CT, MRI or PET.

Just as a side note, I have had tinnitus for the last four years but I think that it too long for it to be latent OC. My father also has tinnitus - so it is likely some genetic thing. It was very annoying at first but you get habituated to it in a few months and it does not bother me if I don't think about it.