Hi, KCDC.

I took the surgical route. I had a third of my tongue removed, the floor of my mouth on the opposite site rebuilt from skin taken from my shoulder and a radical neck disecton to remove all of the lymph nodes from both sides of my neck. This was done since the cancer on my tongue was on the left side and the tumor on the base of my mouth was on the right side. Well, all of my lymph nodes came out clean as a whistle and they were able to get clear margins when removing both tumors. I did not have to go through RAD or Chemo. My time out of work was minimal, 8 weeks and people who do not know about the cancer can't tell a thing. It took a while to being able to eat things, but that is pretty much back to normal. My speech still bothers me a little, I can't say "th" most of the time, but is only normally effected when I try to talk too fast and/or I'm tired. I lost a few teeth and part of my jaw bone, but I'm working on getting this entire thing fixed up. I did a bone transplant about two months ago in order to get enough to get implants where I lost the teeth. Sorry I'm rambling on but just wanted to let you know what the surgical root can be like. By the way, it will be two years on September 12th since I had all of this done. Take care and if you would like to correspond more, my email address is [email protected]. Anne.