I think the two are unrelated, if that helps. I had my results fairly quickly ... but we didn't know mine was cancer when we went in for my first surgery. It was for a sore / wound that wouldn't heal, and my ENT surgeon finally decided that cutting it out to give it a fresh start was the best thing to do. (It was further up than base of tongue.) He may have been thinking cancer, but he didn't tell us. So when he went to cut it out, he had the lab on standby checking margins as he went, and he kept going till he got it all ... I woke up from a longer-than-planned surgery to the news that I had cancer. Emphasis on 'had' at that point because he thought he'd gotten it all. I got the lab report fairly quickly after ... probably at my surgery follow-up. It had the
HPV status on it. We did also do a neck dissection a few months later, even though there was no suggestion of node involvement, because he really wanted to be sure. (I'm really not sure why, actually, but we were so baffled by things that we did what we were told.)
I was all clear after that, except for the healing. And then it came back in December of the same year, in pretty much the same area. So we got to do the surgery, and then rads and chemo. No neck dissection though because they'd removed everything they wanted to test the first time around.
So for us, the lab work was totally separate procedure-wise from the neck dissection, and actually separated by several months time-wise.
