Welcome Michael, Sorry that this "thing" is in your life right now. You have a tough decision ahead and I want to be very cautious about my input as I am not a medical professional. If you can avoid surgery that would be a good thing. Even if you had surgery you would certainly be advised to have radiation and probably chemo anyway. If it were me I would have a long heart to heart talk with the Doc that suggests holding off on surgery. Find out what statistics he/she is relying on. You would be well advised to treat this with everything in the book if that offers the best statistical odds.

You do not want this thing to come back.

As Gary said you need to ask for and find help for your work. The surgery won't be so bad but radiation will make work a bear. Besides stress is contrary to healing and you need to off-load stress.

The question of stage probably can't be completely assessed yet. Node involvement plays an important role in staging and without a radical neck dissection they won't know how many nodes are truly involved. PET scans aren't accurate down to microscopic levels. Stage is important to you only to decide on treatment options. After that you get survivorship and the opposite. There is no such thing as 60% survival when it is the individual.

I recommend survivorship!

Take care.