Hello - welcome to the site, glad you found us when you needed us. My husband also had a primary tumour in his left tonsil although his had spread to at least 1 lymph node.

Your father is fortunate that he has what sounds like a terrific team helping him out. If his/your experience is anything like ours, it will be rough going after the first week or so. As I've written elsewhere, be psychologically prepared for symptoms to arise that the doctors forgot to tell you about ( they can be frightening but often are not serious) and make sure the small things are taken care of such as frequent rinsing with whatever your doctor advises, taking laxatives/stool softeners to avoid unnecessary constipation from strong pain killers, soaking the area affected by the radiation if it begans to get sore with warm lightly salted water and setting up a comfortable place to sit and feed through the PEG tube ( if your father gets one- it really helped my husband maintain his weight).

Today, nine months post treatment, my husband is back working full time and eating most things with him feeling that most of his taste is back.

As for doing research, everyone is different. Myself, I stayed up late nights for several weeks after the diagnosis and during treatment reading medical journals and probably most of the posts on this site. Although I felt informed my husband was not too interested. He had complete trust in his doctors. In fact, my research pretty much confirmed that they were doing what seemed like the best thing for John's diagnosis but I sometimes wondered if I was torturing myself with all the "what ifs" all that info created in my mind.

To this day, when we go for John's monthly check-up the radiation oncologist always turns to me at the end and asks: "do YOU have any questions" because I had so many along the way.

This site is a wonderful place in so many ways. Please come here as often as you need to ask questions. The search function also often turns up several existing posts on a particular issue.

Mary