long background on what has happened so far

If you are reading this then you probably already know I have cancer, so I just want to write down a brief summary of what has lead up me writing this today.

In late September I noticed my tongue hurting an abnormal amount. I complained about it to Jen (because complaining makes dealing with pain easier), and she asked if I had looked at it yet; my response was no. It seems like a no brainer now, but I don't know why I wouldn't have looked at it. When I did, I was shocked to see a white lesion on the right lateral side of my tongue. This wasn't too shocking for me at the time, because I am a teeth grinder, and I thought I must have ground on it in the middle of the night.

That weekend I went home to Phoenix (from Tucson) for Ryan's birthday, and two of my aunts and my mom looked at it also. They all said to go to the health center on campus, and my aunt Maryanne was the first one to utter the words, "It looks like cancer." Although that was frightening to hear, I didn't think it was likely to be the case.

I did go to the health center when I got back in town, which I knew would be fruitless since I didn't have a bacterial infection, virus, or std, and thus was out of the range of expertise of doctors at the health center. This was confirmed when the doctor who saw me said he had no idea what was wrong with me, except he was certain I didn't have cancer. He thought it was best I saw an oral surgeon.

I was referred to an excellent oral surgeon who has been wonderful through this whole process. She said I probably had one of three things: valley fever, tuberculosis, or cancer. To which I told her "we aren't playing 'The Oregon Trail.'" That part was made up and if you didn't play the Oregon Trail computer game in grade school probably isn't funny; in fact it's only borderline humorous if you did play it.

While I joke about it now, it was one of the scariest things someone has said to me in my life, and it was one of the scariest and most emotionally destabilizing things I have heard. If it turned out I had valley fever though, the consequences are really not serious for almost all individuals. In fact most people in Arizona will have valley fever sometime in their life without ever knowing it. Of course, almost every person alive has cancer cells in their body, they just aren't beyond a critical mass that makes them pernicious. The oral surgeon said what I had looked just like cancer, but that for a young, non-tobacco user like myself the probability of this being the case was very small. Instead she thought I had valley fever. To find out what was going on, we did a biopsy of the tongue (painful), and then I went back to the health center to do blood work to see if I had valley fever. (I should also say there was also an outside chance I really had nothing.)

It seems weird to say this, but before I got the biopsy back, I got the bad news that I did not have valley fever. I say bad news, because of the three things to have that was the "best." At this point I really started to worry about what was wrong with me. After, a nerve-wracking few days, I went back to the oral surgeon with Jen and my dad, and got the bad news that I had oral cancer.

I don't think I could accurately characterize how frightening this was. I started crying hard immediately, because cancer is such a terrifying word. As all this has unfolded I have learned a lot about cancer, and now know that cancer is an apartment complex that houses a multitude of different diseases, all different, all requiring different treatments, and all differing in survival rates. I was diagnosed with well differentiated squamous cell carcinoma on the right lateral side of the tongue. The size of the tumor was T2 (out of 4) although I would later find out it was "only" T1 and that the rest of the tumor was just scar tissue.