Alicia's Update...

Last Friday I had surgery to remove some spots on the base of my tongue.  When they were doing the surgery, the surgeons initial reaction based on his visual inspection, was that the spots did not appear to be cancerous (and this is a guy who sees a lot of cancer in this part of the throat).  However when the pathology came back they were all cancer.  So, we have decided to pump the brakes and regroup.  I will NOT have surgery on the 19th.  We are working on getting an appointment at the University of Chicago, thank you to Meredith Boessen for working so hard on this,  to get a second opinion on the route that we should be taking (we are targeting the University of Chicago because of their specialty in head and neck cancers).  My doctors here are also meeting on Tuesday to get a new plan in place.  The doctors (both the surgeons and the lead oncologist) feel that I am not reacting enough to the treatments that I have had.  I don’t have radiation scarring like I should (and scarring is the purpose of radiation; they damage the tissue so that it cant grow the cancer cells or any cells at all), I shouldn’t have so many spots on the base of the tongue (these don't appear to have reacted to the radiation or the chemo at this point), etc.  All involved are in agreement that my case is unusual and rather than rush into a procedure or process without weighing the pros and cons we are all going to work together to form a new plan.  So, it looks like I still have some more fighting to do and a longer fight ahead before I can say that this chapter is behind me.  Since my case is so strange we don’t always have, and may not have, answers or we may  have to change directions quickly.  That is just part of having cancer.
I appreciate everyone’s thoughts and prayers. 
It does hurt to talk and eating is still a challenge for me so if I don’t answer your call or decline an invite it’s nothing personal.

**Edited to Add: If you have questions please post them on the comments and Alicia or I will try to answer them.  There may not be a good answer, but would rather have all the information here, rather than the both us of repeating ourselves to different people.  And your question may have been on the mind of someone else.  Also, Alicia is working right now so she is kinda busy (you know working, having an almost 1 year old and having cancer are a little time consuming) so don't assume that a slow response or no response means something bad.**