Danny with your permission I will answer your question on the board. I think that it is an important one, and both it and the several answers you will probably get will be of value to others. As to its effect on those that read the message board, all of our lives have to be balanced between hope and reality. While to some ignorance may be bliss, the more we know about something the better chance we have of coping with it, be it disease or death. This of course requires an attitude that pulls your head out of the sand and forces confrontation with sometimes disturbing concepts such as our own mortality. Many of these ideas instill fear and require courage to cope with them. Just remember that courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

I find your doctors comment curious, and I do not believe it to be valid, just ask Dinah who is currently fighting a liver metastasis from an oral cancer primary. In part perhaps the doctor is correct in those that have their cancer caught early. The primary metastasis of SCC oral cancers is the cervical lymph nodes. So given this, he/she is correct in saying that it stays local, or at least in the head and neck region. But once you have cancer cells within your lymph system, even though local to the primary, they have free access to everywhere that system can take them