Hi --

You are not that young for this cancer -- my husband's ENT said she is seeing more and more people in their 20s and 30s with SCC of H/N. She feels it is due to human papilloma virus or similar, rather than smoking, as many of these are non-smokers.

Whether you get surgery or chemoradiation seems to depend not only on your stage but where you go for a consult. Johns Hopkins, MD Anderson and Sloan-Kettering (the 3 top CCC in USA) rarely if ever do tongue surgeries first, they feel chemoradiation has as good a record and without the long-term swallowing and speech impacts (but many rather nasty side effects, some but not all acute rather than chronic). Surgery is reserved if the chemoradiation does not achieve control. Have you gotten a second opinion from a radiation oncologist? I strongly recommend that anyone with cancer should get a second opinion from a different treatment center if at all possible, in fact in USA some insurance companies require it. We went to two, Hopkins and Sloan, and they both told my husband (who has base-of-tongue SCC) to do chemoradiation, not surgery.

Gail