Sophie, I would offer that X means Unknown. Truly neither good or bad. If you have good medical care those caregivers will already be working on filling those "x's". Keep in mind that if you choose to take the watch and wait course of action, then some of those x's will not be filled in. For example; N=nodes will not be filled in unless you have those nodes sent to pathology. Usually this will mean some form of neck dissection. By no means does this mean bad. Your care givers will rely on statistics to come up with a treatment plan. Statistics work fine in their perspective. From your perspective, you are a sample of one. From the patient perspective the TNM system can be a source of excessive fear or unrealistic lack of concern. Really, some people survive bad TNM scored cancers and some do not with good scores.

The best thing is to try to control fear. (and I know that is not always easy)!