KimRuth,

There are basically two types of radiation treatments used for head and neck with the exception of brain tumors.

The older type which is still widely used is called external beam radiation. The new type is IMRT which stands for Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy. IMRT is an advanced high precison therapy which can deliver higher radiation doses to the tumor or specific target areas and minimize irradiation of surrounding healthy tissues in order to reduce or possibly avoid post radiation treatment side effects.

IMRT is used in conjunction with 3-dimensional computed tomography of the patient or in essence CT scans to deliver doses to precisely the intented areas.

As it has been said in previous posts, yours most likely is not a recurrence but continued growth of cancer cells left behind following the initial surgery.

Like Mark previously said please do not worry about statistics because everyone is different. Plus statistics tend to aggregate a lot of different people with different conditions in one group and the relevance of that statistics to a particular individual may be misleading.