Hi everybody,

My mom (Barbara) is just ending week four of her six weeks of radiation. She stopped chemo after the second week because they said the radiation was doing the job on its own judging by all her sores. She finally started taking the pain killers and went to fill her perscription for the patch. She just saw her ENT on Tuesday and we asked him some questions on staging etc. and if this was a reccurance or an occult cancer. He said it was a reccurance and since she originally started out with the lukeplakia (for the past 10 years and it only became cancer in 03) and that she has shown that the cancer has not spread to her lymph nodes that she is a candidate for cancers in the oral cavity and that this is a reccurance and he cannot stage it because it was a reccurance. That doesn't make much sense to me and since my sister saw the original pathology report that she swears did not show a clear margin where this new cancer came up I am still unsure of what he says. I strongly believe they should have done the radiation the first time around considering she has had the lukeplakia for years now so we definately know that just the surgery has not worked for some time because of the fact that it has recurred so often. Does anybody else have any experience with the lukeplakia eventually turning into cancer. It seems like almost everybody else just got cancer and never had this precancerous condition. I'm a little confused any input would be helpful.

Thank you,
Danielle