Karen,

My first go around with this disease was treated with radiation only (no chemo). That was to my primary site in the soft palet. That cancer never returned. My recurrence was in a lymph node in my neck. I'll have to assume that a few cells got away from the primary and the radiation they did give me to the neck missed them or was ineffective.

Anyhow; although we spend a great deal of time on these boards discussing the different chemo options, effects, and effectiveness and so on, chemo is only a small part of the equation. It�s the radiation and surgery that carries the big load on killing the cancer, chemo only weakens it and not by that much. I have heard we can get up to a 10% boost to our survivability rate over 5 years with the addition of chemo, but my MO said he only figures in 5% given all the variable studies he has seen. I was never that worried about the chemo side of things as I wanted to make sure I was choosing the right BIG GUN to kill the cancer radiation wise. I have done both IMRT and Cyberknife. I would spend more time with your doctors discussing the radiation methodologies than worrying about chemo. There are a number of different options on the radiation side you can look at and I would make sure your team has considered all of them.

I found that some institutions will not consider different radiation options because they do not have the equipment on site. I was at University of Michigan and after the IMRT treatments left some residual cancer they called the game. They had me in for my palliative chemo meeting where they effectively were telling me I only had a short time left to live and the chemo would give me an extra few months. Two weeks later I was getting cyberknife treatments at the University of Pittsburgh. I finished that up with a clear scan a few months ago and will go back for my 6 month PET at the end of this month (just about the time U of M said I would be getting close to dying). U of M did not have Cyberkife technology in house.