Thank you so much, everyone! It really helps to get all these ideas and personal experiences and Jerry - I found your explanation very enlightening. When the surgeon first told us, there were three of us - my daughter, myself and a retired psychiatric nurse friend of mine and she just told me that she had heard the doctor say the same thing about the tongue regenerating. She also said that as a nurse, she was surprised because she had not previously heard of this "regenerating". I can see now, that since the teeth help to maintain the size of the tongue and when part of the tongue is removed, the resulting space could possibly allow the tongue to "spread out" or enlarge.