Another with Zero surgery to the tongue (my primary was BOT.)

Full disclosure: I did have surgery first, I had a large (tangerine sized) lump under my right jaw removed. The path report on the lump provided the diagnosis that it was a metastatic tumor in a lymph node, and it was oropharyngeal carcinoma.

It took nearly 60 days for them to discover the Primary tumor, which as I said, was in the very base of my tongue (and the size of a golf-ball.)

We talked about the possible need for robotic surgery, splitting the mandible and the down side of that, and elected to go 8 weeks of rads with 3 applications of Cisplatin, 3 weeks apart, and re-evaluate things after a post-tx PET scan. That revealed no detectable cancer, and no further need to consider the surgery.

Good luck!