Hello all,

Thanks much for all the advice!

I went to dental sick call this morning. I can't exactly just go to an ENT on my own time, partially because my chain of command needs to know about it so I can get the insurance all worked out, and partially because there's literally no time in my schedule during the week (and I have no control whatsoever over my schedule). The two avenues available to me are medical sick call and dental sick call.

So here's how it went: the dentist checked it out and felt around. She indicated that she thought it was an enlarged salivary gland. I'm not 100% convinced... I'm not positive she actually felt what I was feeling with my tongue (I've never been able to physically see the lump... Not sure if that's cause it's within the flesh or if it's just too far down). Again, it's located maybe .5 to 1 inch below my gum line on my bottom left inner jaw, maybe .5 cm across or a little more.

Anyways, I got a full 360 degree x ray. It came out totally normal.

Does a normal x ray generally mean everything is ok?

I told her about the lymph nodes, but she didn't seem terribly concerned.

So I'm left with the diagnosis of an enlarged salivary gland and instructions to keep an eye on it.

Courses of action available at this point:

-leave it alone for a few weeks, see if the nodes recede, go back to dental if they don't

-go to medical to get the enlarged nodes checked out