Good morning! I had stage 3 Squamous Cell Carcinoma in my tongue. I had hemi-glossectomy surgery in May 2022 and finished radiation Aug 2022. I'm grateful to have come through it but having trouble accepting my new reality. I've never been a depressed person through my many trials in life but feeling overwhelmed trying to function with limited speech, lack of energy, weight loss, and my changed appearance from swelling and lymph edema. To make it worse, I was newly married and this has put a huge strain on my marriage. I really don't want to go on antidepressants and I tried a support group but seeing people so much worse off than me only made me fear my future worse (many of them started where I am now). How do you cope??????

In my case, I immediately accepted the fact that I had cancer and that I knew nothing about how to help myself medically, so trusted the various professionals to do their jobs just as well as I can do my (in no way related whatsoever) job. Worrying was not going to do anything to improve things for me. Being angry about it didn't change the fact that it happened. I simply went to my surgery and let the people do their jobs and help me. I appreciate the efforts of all of these people involved - oncologists, imaging professionals, various surgeons & other support doctors, loads of nurses, learning students, cleaning and administration staff. All of those 100+ people were there to help me. And they did a great job - I'm still here 8+ years later and hoping to stick around for a lot longer.

Sure, I'm disfigured now. One side of my neck is smaller than the other because they scraped out a bunch of lymph nodes. Half of my original tongue is missing and replaced with a chunk of my forearm around my wrist. I have the extremely noticeable scar on my wrist where they removed that skin/muscle/arteries or whatever else went along with the flap. If I wear shorts, you can still make out the place where they scraped the skin off my thigh to fill in the hole in my forearm. Even 8 years later, I sometimes find a hair growing on the wrist portion of my fancy new tongue. When I try to do pushups, my wrist tires out really quickly but I can still do it at least. Went through the radiation and now my teeth are no longer straight & food gets stuck in there regularly. Sometimes if I take a bite of food that's just a bit too large I find it kind of hard to swallow and start to feel like I'm choking, so I have to be more careful than I was before cancer. But the motivation to get back as closely to my normal life as possible really helped my recovery. I'm still able to compete in my sports and go hiking like I used to before cancer. Post cancer, I've raced outrigger canoes in Hawaii and raced dragonboats in the Philippines, South Korea, Germany and many many times closer to home along the west coast of North America. Doing my fitness tests and keeping my spot on the team with people 20-30 years younger than me. I feel fortunate to still be in a position to do all of these things. Sucks that cancer picked me, but it happened and being mad about that does nothing to help me move forward. Go move forward.