Jenn --

I hope everything went well for you and it turned out to be just an infection.

My husband had a similar situation, in fact his enlarged lymph node was CT-scanned and radiologist said it was "unlikely to be cancer" but was most probably just an abscess. Barry also had an asymmetric tonsil, so his ENT wanted to take it out. (She had HNC as a young woman and was being suspicious or perhaps more correctly, cautious.) However, Barry put it off and put it off as he has an aged mother in England he had to visit, some friends coming over for a month, you know, the usual --so several months passed.

Finally the ENT got him into surgery for what was to be a routine tonsillectomy (and she said she does a lot on adults) but he was one of the unlucky non-smokers, a pathology exam was done during surgery and it was cancer. The ENT took all the tonsil out down to connective tissue, negative margins save for a bit at the base of tongue, and did a fine needle biopsy of the lymph node (also cancer) -- very very bad news as he had been totally asymptomatic except for the somewhat enlarged node, and was in fine health. (As an aside, this surgery wasn't very bad, he was back to eating normally in about a week and only had serious pain -- controlled by Percoset for about 2-3 days. After that Tylenol was enough.)

The ENT sent us to Johns Hopkins because (as in your situation) our local hospital in MD does not have a comprehensive cancer center. CT scans done at the time of diagnosis fortunately showed that the intervening months of delay had not seen much growth if any, so lucky there at least.

Barry underwent 7 weeks of concurrent chemotherapy (carboplatin) and radiation (tomo-IMRT) and is now 6 weeks out of treatment and doing very well. Yes, he had many of the nasty side effects you will read about but they are resolving, and some were not as bad as we expected. We got a lot of support and advice from this forum (and the OCF web site, a must-read) as well as from the doctors and nurses at Hopkins.

He went back to his ENT yesterday and she feels the cancer responded well to treatment, based on her exam, but awaits a more formal assessment in another 3 weeks when Hopkins will do scans and perhaps, a biopsy. So keeping our fingers crossed!

Meanwhile Barry is eating well, going birding every day that the weather is nice, and attacking our piles of leaves with rake and leaf-blower.

Again, hope the news was good but if not, we are here for you...

Gail