I am 3 weeks post surgery and am finally healing. It was not fun!!

Unfortunately I have developed adhesions to the left ventral and front of my tongue/bottom of mouth, despite a hyper mobile tongue prior to sx and my attempts to move my tongue after sx. My tongue is still numb with electrical nerve pain to this area. The area was not grafted. I can swallow but not chew, due to risk of biting my tongue. I am eating pasta, eggs soft stuff although I cannot really taste it.

Speech is compromised. I have problems with the soft C sound, S, sh and wh and am unable to return to work or find another job until my speech improves. Since I live alone this is a pressing issue. (My friends tease me about sounding like I have lost 20 IQ points. Gee Thanks.)

I go for my first post op follow up visit with my ENT surgeon next week. What are the most common treatments for adhesions of the tongue? I gather lasering (lysis) the adhesions? What does that involve and what is the recovery like? Risks of further adhesions? How does one minimize the risks of adhesions?

Any thoughts?

I think the best way to prevent the adhesions is keep moving your tongue - treat it almost like exercise - and running your finger around in there a bit - (sterile finger - aka gloved ) you don't want an infection... But just keep moving it... Hugs and good luck!

Thanks Cheryl

I have been moving my tongue and doing some massaging although it causes pain. My doctor suspects my speech will improve with therapy but the limited ROM of my tongue may not. The adhesions may require surgical intervention in the months to come. Until then I have been refered to speech therapy and they will reassess later to determine if my tongue needs to be fixed and a graft applied.

And even though my cancer was poorly differentiated and the risk of re-occurance is still there, today I am currently CANCER FREE!!!!

My tongue is still numb and the pain is still in the 5/10 or less. My tongue is thick looking on the surgical side, mostly due to adhesions and tends to deviate to the left (surgical side) rubbing up against my crooked teeth. :P

The hardest part of this is that everytime I speak it's a reminder that I had cancer, and as an umemployed single person...I have to figure out when I can go back to work and in what capacity. And what to tell people!! (employers, aquaintances, guys)

Has anyone out there, had their adhesions lysed/fixed? What was the recovery like? Similiar to your first surgery or less traumatic, painful etc? And how soon after your first surgery was that done?

Hey there congrats on being cancer free that's so awesome!! and yes there's always a chance of recurrence but you know what - you have to think beyond that. Your tongue will heal... probably another month or so... the adhesions I think I read somewhere they cut them at some point it sounds semi painful but I imagine it heals quickly. I do think your speech will return to almost normal at some point (my surgeon said I would heal fine and speak normally just have a bit of a lisp when I was tired... he's right... who knew a tongue could get tired ( I listen to any messages I leave to hear how I sound and i'm at say 80 at this point since there is still swelling from radiation). How much did they remove of your tongue? I lost about a third, the underside, on the left... my tongue too drifts off to the side when I stick it out... but it's pretty good otherwise and the swelling steadily goes down... when my plastics fellow came in to peruse me with another student, the student couldn't even tell what was old tongue and what was new... but if you can get away without a graft do... the surgery isn't horrible but it's not fun either.
As for telling people... you work in the medical field tell them you had tongue surgery - you're healing and will be fine (they should be very accepting since they deal with this stuff all the time).. guys too tell them you had a small tumor and had surgery... you're fine and your speaking will get better. If a guy can't love and accept you for who you are then good riddance... because he certainly won't stick around when you really need him. Hugs and soo glad you are doing well! Keep an eye on your neck... you caught the cancer at an early stage, but poorly differentiated can move fast... any sign of swollen lyph nodes, high tail it back to the dr. And keep up your protein!!! take care!

I have bronchitis right now, so I am on Abx. I could tell I was coming down with something as I had a low grade fever and had facial sweating so I went to the ER on Sunday, they said it looked healthy. Dr. Matthews my ENT gave me the Abx.

I wish they had gone ahead and did the graft with the laser in the first place, I dont know why he opted not to. I have no idea what volume of tonguw was removed, it was less than 1mm in depth but the full length of my ventral left side of my tongue was lasered as well as the front tip and bottom of the mouth. Only my right lateral side was spared. (no dysplasia there)

My tongue looks normal just fat and bulky on the left side, I cannot stick my tongue out or lift it up, or move it to the right well enough to sweep food to the back of my mouth. I have no trouble swallowing. I would say a large area, shallow depth?? I think I am a T1N0M0?

Still would like to hear from anyone who has had their adhesions surgery clipped/trimmed reduced? (whatever is the right terminology. I know it as lysis of adhesions, only cause of my gyne issues.) I find the limitation in the tongue (ROM) clausterphobic, weird huh?

I get why you are feeling claustrophobic because your natural movements are restricted. I had the entire length and undrside of my tongue replaced as well - I think the adhesions are because you have two raw surfaces touching so it's natural they would want to heal together - with a graft you wouldn't have that problem because there's no open wound area. Moving it as much as possible despite the pain should help. It's too bad there wasn't a non porous mouth guard that you could use to keep the two surfaces separate - it would have to be sterile though which is hard to do - during the day it's not so bad - but those inactive periods at night are the hard times. My thickness of the area removed was 14 times your thickness. It was 1.4 cm deep - I think any graft he would do on you would be very superficial. More like a simple layer if skin, but that's still very involved. The swelling will decrease once you heal. It won't stay like that. Hopefully you're past all of this and just need to heal. Sorry you've ended up With bronchitis.. Not fun. Take care and rest up! It helps with the healing as you know.