Had our meeting with the Cardiothoratic Surgeon today after the multidisciplinary board got a chance to look through Jen's case and her PET scans from Wednesday.

Looks like the cancer is indeed isolated in the left upper lobe and will be surgically removed next Wednesday - a lobectomy using non-invasive VATS. One level V lymph node showed moderate uptake on the PET scan well away from the cancer so as a precautionary measure, they are also going to remove the rest of the lymph nodes that lead from the neck down to the lungs just in case and will determine whether or not radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy is required once they are able to see if there is any cancer cells in these lymph nodes.

The shocking news was to follow - the doctors were unable to determine whether or not this was a metastases from the tongue cancer or whether it was a new primary lung cancer based on her recent scans & pathology reports. The way the cancer was isolated and formed within her lungs was also very mysterious and hence they have said its pretty much a 50/50 chance between mets vs. new primary.

In the instance of the cancer being a new primary - the chances of cure are very high as it has been caught extremely early. In the instance of this being mets to the lungs, they have given us a 30% 5 year survival rate as long as they do not see any cancer in the surrounding lymph nodes once they remove them via surgery.

They also found out that the SCC was HPV 16+ positive which is the first time we have heard this was the case.

Very confused and don't know how to make sense of all this information.. any experience, knowledge and/or comments that can shed light on this would be greatly appreciated.