Hey oc12. Welcome to the forum but I’m sorry about your diagnosis. I was diagnosed with tongue cancer on Aug 3rd by my ent specialist. He cautioned me about it being a preliminary diagnosis and to wait from final confirmation from the biopsy, but he really didn’t leave much room for doubt.

With respect to your concern about informing family and friends, I guess it depends on the age and maturity of your family members. In my case, I let our adult children know right away. It would be hard to keep it from then and they all knew I was seeing the ent specialist right away. I think I leaned on the side of providing as much information as I had to them. Obviously the diagnosis had not been confirmed (that took another week), but I think it went well with them. If any of them had any questions, I encouraged them to ask. I think they all asked google a lot more and became quite informed about the (awful) affliction.

Good luck, and you will get lots of good input from this forum