Dave,

For what it's woth, my 28 year old non-smoking, non-drinking daughter had a base of tongue tumor. She had extensive surgery, followed by radiation. She only lost a small portion of her tongue since the tumor was on the base, not on the mobile tongue. Because of that, she had minimal disfiguration and only a slight lisp from the surgery. Unfortunately, the treatment failed and she had a recurrence and died several months later.

Although the surgeon got clean margins and her tumor was well-differentiated with no extra-capsular spread and no peri-neural involvement, she did have 4 positive nodes. Evidently, it had already started to spread and in that case, surgery was not the best option. If any of your "lit up" areas actually contain cancer cells, then surgery may not be your best option either.

Every case is different and there is no way to know if she would have responded better to radiation and chemo instead of surgery and RAD. There however have been many people here on the forum who have had success with RAD and chemo. There have also been a handful of young people here with tongue cancer who had surgery and RAD who did not survive. Again, every person is different, but based on this info and my personal gut feeling, if I were to be diagnosed with SCC, I would choose RAD and chemo before surgery.

Rosie