Oh, the "other cancer" stories. They're the worst. Even my own mother who had a lumpectomy for breast cancer followed by radiation thought she knew just what I was going through. She tells me, "Radiation is nothing. It takes longer to set you up than to do it. They just zap you for a couple seconds." They just don't have a clue.

The worst most ridiculous comparison was when a friend of mine told me he had had an 8 hour surgery for his cancer. Turns out it was skin cancer and the 8 hours were sitting in the doctor's office waiting for pathology to come back after they cut a piece of skin out and checked the margins to see if they needed to take a little more. I guess it took all day. But he wasn't even in the hospital. And he's comparing that to my cancer.

I now have colon cancer with mets to lungs and my two lung surgeries weren't even as bad as treatment for oral cancer was. Colon cancer is now what I will die of, but my sympathy lies with oral cancer patients. And my love is still with the people in this forum that helped me through that.