Young and worried. Do you plan on being young and worried forever? We'll have to find something shorter and happier to call you. Now the Americans here might not appreciate just how remote you can be from even a basic GP in Australia, so we'll cut them some slack on that. What town are you in/near? Even remote places have procedures for getting you treated.

You need to see a GP first for a referral to a specialist ENT surgeon. The public system generally have a cancer referral centre in one of the major hospitals in your state. BUT... as we've said before this could be a million things besides cancer. The only way to definitively diagnose cancer is to biopsy the tumour or aspirate a swollen node.

Doctors look at a whole range of things when doing a diagnosis. If you Google you will come to the conclusion every tummy ache is bowel cancer an every headache a brain tumour. Telling the difference requires years of training, thats why the doctors get the big bucks.

Let me tell you one thing I learned about smoking related cancers. They are considered to be exposure dependent, so the more you smoke the worse it gets. They measure the exposure in pack years. A pack year is a pack a day for a year. So if you smoke a pack a day for 4 years you have 4 pack years. I smoked less than that over a lot more years, and mine worked out to be 5 pack years. The ENTs said while it is a factor, it was nothing compared to P16, which caused mine. I quit straight away of course, and so must you. Completely and right away. Whatever your diagnosis on Monday, consider this your wake up call. Not everyone survives a second wake up call.

As I said earlier and everyone has said something similar, stop smoking, stop Googling and stop stressing. And wait to see what the doctor says. Let us know how you go.