Michelle, Your mother's condition sounds like where I was after radiation (although my symptoms built up more gradually during radaition). I had lots of mouth pain and it didn't really start to let up at all until maybe three months out. Six to eight months is a good estimate of how long it will take for the worst symptoms to go away and then you can expect she will probably take a full year to feel back to some kind of normal. In fact, one ENT I saw when I was about ten months out from radiation said that I was about 70% healed but I could expect the other 30% to take up to another year.

She may beat that schedule but it would be best to prepare her for a long slow recovery. The good news is even when it's slow, you do recover.

A CT scan is a lot of additional radiation for her at this point and it might show areas that are just irritated right now. Try to have faith that she's OK and these are just symptoms from the treatment. I know that's hard and certianly if the symptoms don't start letting up in another month or two, you might want to push for some other tests but right now chances are she's just going through what a lot of us went through. This too shall pass!

Nelie