Elizabeth,

Welcome to the OCF forum. I'm glad your sister found it and was able to put you in touch with us. You'll find that there are quite a few of us who didn't seem to fit the standard "risk profile", but who got some form of oral cancer anyway.

I was diagnosed with tongue cancer at the age of 39, after a long delay when a couple of my doctors felt that my symptoms were nothing serious, as I had never smoked and was a social drinker. My surgery (partial glossectomy and modified radical neck dissection) showed clean margins, but the oncology team at my cancer center felt strongly that I needed to follow up with radiation to attack this disease with everything possible. My pathology reports indicated that the tumor had the potential to be fairly aggressive, and I think that was one of the factors that guided their recommendation.

Is your oncologist affiliated with a comprehensive cancer center? In a case such as yours, where there is a recurrence, I think it's especially important to have the full input of an oncology team at a CCC, where they can evaluate your situation and look at it from all sides -- surgery, radiation, chemo -- and try to come up with a treatment program to get rid of the cancer once and for all. The radiation/chemo part can be really tough, but if it's what it takes to do the job, it's worth it and there are many of us here who can do our best to help you through it.

Please keep us posted on what you find out, and you'll find a lot of support here.

Cathy