We are not correctly answering the question here. Eric got this right. Lymphocytes are naturally occurring cells in the blood (white blood cells) , which are divided into 3 types, all part of your body's defense mechanisms. T, B and NK are the types, and they all have a function of defense. T and B create antibodies and fight infections, and NK cells go after viruses and cancer cells. Their name has clearly confused some because of the similarity to something we discuss all the time, which is lymph node involvement in head and neck cancers.

So the full question here really cannot be answered because the pathology comment is probably taken out of context. You would expect to find NK lymphocytes in a malignancy as a normal defense function. In a biopsy sample these would be found included with other cells that had characteristics of malignancy like and enlarged nuclei.

But all this is kind of academic here since we are only getting parts of the pathology report. The important points would be that the sample taken had clean margins, meaning they got all of it. But since there was no mention of scans, which might show cervical lymph node involvement, (which I would want to see with and without contrast before making additional decisions) the next sample would be taken from sentinel nodes if none were enlarged and obvious, and done with a fine needle biopsy initially, or a single node excision, before someone leaped off into a full neck dissection to remove what was after that second pathology report, clearly identified as a neck metastasis.

This was luckily a very early find. Early USUALLY equates to better long term outcomes.