AzTarHeel...My neck dissection was done differently than most here. It was AFTER the radiation treatments not before. This was because I had the maximum exposure of my spinal column etc. to the radiation, and the cervical nodes were still suspicious. While surgeons don't particularly like to cut on radiated tissue (it gets gummy and hard to deal with) the safe thing was to get the rest of the suspected nodes out of me, along with the surrounding fatty tissues, just to be sure that radiation had done it's job. As it turns out they were all dead in biopsy, but I don't regret the decision today one bit. I know that they/I did everything in our bag of tricks, and as someone with a late stage cancer I was in my own words "circling the drain" when diagnosed. I wasn't in any position to make second guesses, or take conservative approaches. I think that I am here today instead of flushed down the drain, because we hit it with everything in the bag of trick right then. If I end up in recurrence, it will not be because we did a half assed job the first time around. It will be the luck of the draw, bad karmic debt, I was just too far along when we started and we missed some micro met somewhere else in my body, or the agent (likely HPV16/18) that started all this in my body is still around and will cause a similar event to occur again, or I have a genetic p53 defect that I can