Dave, I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents too. If you look at my "signature" here, you'll see I had all of the above; surgery, radiation and chemo. However, I had Stage II cancer and had the surgery first because it was possible at that point that that would be the end point of my treatment. I had approx. 30% of my tonguie removed--it was on the left ventral side--fully visible--not base of tongue. I didn't have any kind of flap. From then until when I started rad and chemo was about 2 months and in that time I was talking almost completely normally again (I had an occassional lisp but I later lost it) and had moved from eating just smoothies and shakes to eating almost everything (I could handle dry food such as breads with water in my mouth or olive oil or dressing on the bread--probably I could even have done chips with dip though I didn't really try.

They took out 28 nodes during the neck dissection part of the surgery and there was no cancer in any of them. However, it turned out I did have some aspects of the tongue tumor that apprently put me at more risk of recurrence so I opted for an aggressive treatment of radiation with chemo on top of the surgery to be really sure all the cancer cells were gone. If you read my posts elsewhere, you will see that since that ended I have been unable to eat anything at all due to mouth pain and drymouth from that treatment. I assume eventually that too will end (I certianly hope) but truthfully it seems to be much more of a hurdle to heal from that than from the surgery.

Also, an argument for getting surgery prior to rad (or rad and chemo) is that your tissue heals much better and faster before radiation than after. Good luck with the decision you make. This board has been a real sanity saver to me since I am not being treated at a major CCC (although my rad oncologist is from one--long story) and I have ahd to be very proactive about getting what I need. Also, people here always know what you are going through when the going gets tough and man is it nice to know there's a group of people somewhere who have "been there and done that" as they say.

Nelie