Sorry to hear that you are dealing with all these delays which cascade into stress. While I am a fan of Canada’s providing medical to their population, unlike the US where everything is private pay or paid by insurances that have to be bought, I hear from many Canadian patients about long waits for treatments, and laboratory work. The systems capacity is definitely overloaded.

I can’t imagine a patient knowing that they have a cancer and then being put into a queue for treatment knowing it is continuing to get worse while they are waiting. But worse are the American patients I hear from without insurance, too young to be in the Medicare system, making enough money to not qualify for Medicaid but not making enough to pay for treatments, and already diagnosed so excluded from any insurance coverage by the pre existing condition exemption of coverage is they could muster the money to buy insurance. A no mans land with very few options.

While they did get a result after that long wait of atypical cells, luckily that is not yet cancer, (which it may never become, think positive) and not even dysplasia, which would indicate a movement to cancer. Atypical cells could be something other than precancerous, and it’s a nebulous category that doesn’t tell you anything… there is no usable information your nine weeks of waiting yielded. Frustrating. But if you consider the positive in that finding, it was not cancer or even dysplasia which would have been clearly detectable and named. So your worst fears have not been realized at this point in time.

This is obviously superficial and not invasive. I’m wondering why they just didn’t laser it off. That would be a normal procedure here. Removal while small and non invasive is always the safe route to take. And vaporizing it with a laser is not an invasive procedure to go through, though the area would be sore for a week or two while it healed in by secondary intent.

I’m not good at shutting my own mind off about things unknown. So I’ve got no good advice other than to stay busy with other things to occupy your thoughts. Perhaps others here have some good relaxation techniques that they might pass on. Given my personality, I’d probably occupy some of my time calling the lab every day to see if they know anything, in the mistaken belief that they would get it done early just to get rid of me……


Brian, stage 4 oral cancer survivor. OCF Founder and Director. The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.