Can I give some advice?
Sit down,lean back, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Seriously...you'll feel a bit better.

You will probably see/hear some PET results early in the week. If there is metastic processes going on, it will likely change the treatment course since they have to address the metastices as well as the primary. It may add chemo to the mix treatment wise.

I think that you're research is fairly accurate. Oral cancer is relatively rare to begin with, and when it invades the mandible as opposed to the tonsils, or base of the tongue seems to me to be fairly infrequent.

My mandible was removed from midline of my chin to just below the TM joint. That is the point of critcal decision; if the joint is invaded, it cn't be effectively reconstructed to functional form. It often changes the procedure in that case; since the function of the joint is critical to chewing, without it there is no more chewing.

An all liquid diet doesn't need the rigid jaw, and to reduce the surgical trauma and "legacy" problems of bone removal, they may opt to replace the jawbone with dense muscle tissue from the thigh.

That makes the physical appearance acceptable, but there is no real functionality for eating. Talking is OK, though, and the appearance is close to normal.

Why is he waiting that long for his surgery? At sage IV, time is pretty critical, and waiting for a doctor to get back from vacation....well, I think personally I'd be getting a different Doctor, but that's me.

Cancers grow at a fixed rate. If it takes "X" weeks for it to grow from 1cm to 2cm, it takes the same amount of time for it to grow from 4cm to 8cm.

I had 5 weeks between diagnosis and surgery, and my tumor (the part that was visible) grew from something that was the size of the end of my finger to something that was 6cm long.

It does appear that it's "speeding up"...it's not, it's growing at the same rate as it was all along.

I will keep you in my thoughts. If there is anything that you want to ask about in more detail, or have any "what's it like after treatment" questions, send me a private message and I'll pass along my email and phone number to you

Wayne