...there was a cluster of what I thought to be very painful fever blisters on the side of my tongue, way in the back on my left hand side along with a nice case of strep throat. That was July-August of 2011. Medicine was administered and the strep infection was vanquished! That was that. Fast forward to November of that same year when I began to feel like I always had food or something stuck in my mouth at the base of my tongue on the left hand side. At first inspection, it appeared to merely be a raised, whitish patch on my tongue roughly in the same location as the cluster of fever blisters that I had a few months ago. It did not concern me that much at the time. I held out until around Christmas of 2011, at which point I decided that it had indeed gotten bigger and I made an appointment to go see my primary care doctor about it.
I can remember this visit to the doctor very well to this day. He took one look at the lesion on my tongue and told me I needed to make an appointment with an ENT specialist immediately and he gave me a referral. At that point I began to be a little more concerned about what this was on the base of my tongue. The ENT visit was super-exciting as they took a couple of core samples from the part of my tongue in question. That was not enjoyable, and lucky for little Bowen and A.J., they got to sit there and watch the whole thing go down. It took a few days for the biopsy to come back, but when it did, it confirmed that the growth on my tongue was classified as a squamous cell carcinoma. Thus began the roller coaster that we have been riding since that initial diagnosis that seems so long ago.
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