Sandy

When I was first diagnosed in August 2007, I was stunned that all the internet sites and hospital web sites consistently described Head and Neck Cancer as "very aggressive" with poor survival rates. Now part of that is due to late discovery so many H&N cancers are stages III and IV - skewing the statistics. Part of the puzzle is genetic, here is a link to a news article exploring "micro-RNA": Genetic markers for Agressive H&N Cancer My wife has always been depressed by the ubiquitous 50% 5 year survival rate that appears in this article also. There was also a very informative general article in Parade magazine today in the Ask Marilyn column about fundamental cancer issue and why a cure is so elusive (it's not a foreign invader like virus or bacteria, it's your own cells gone wild; only one cell needs to survive treatment to have a recurrence; current treatment kills normal cells, etc.) Bottom line is that our cancer is one of the very worst.
One excellent source of information is the OCF feed on news plus the archived articles on the OCF board. Many times a news article that Google pulled for me is explained much better and more accurately on Brian's selection of the news.