Caveat: Cancer

I’ll just stick to the facts, mostly, for now.

The doctor said: “You have cancer.” Well. No ambiguity, there.

It’s cancer of the tongue, possibly lymph, too. What stage? “It’s a gray area.” We can’t know what ‘stage’ until surgery – that will include exploratory surgery and excision of lymph area on left side of neck.

Surgery will be in 2 weeks. Depending on how bad things look once they’re inside, looking around, it could be a simple 2-hour surgery or up to a 7-hour long surgery, including tracheotomy and extensive reconstruction after excision. Just to be clear: they will be removing some portion of the back of my tongue, and putting what’s left of it back together again, regardless of the other aspects (i.e. lymph etc.).

I will miss at least one month of work. Because of my relative “youth,” prognosis is good as far as recovery of functionality: speaking, eating, tasting. Still, I’m not sure what kind of “speaking teacher” I’m going to be, after this. Curt is being very kind.

There’s some irony, to be a linguist with tongue cancer…

Following surgery and recovery, radiation is standard for this type of diagnosis. Six weeks of daily radiation, starting probably in August at some point.

Statistics: survival rate is about 65%.

Insurance: with Korean National Health Insurance my copay will not exceed 5%. At that, probably still in the thousands of dollars.

Work: I need to find a short-term (one or two month) replacement. I will remain an employee of KarmaPlus.

Later, I can wax philosophical or journalistic or literary.