I had tors and a neck dissection on 10/29/24. I was in the hospital for two days and then stayed in the hotel for over 14 days as my surgeon, Dr. Van Abel suggested I stay in the area in case of bleeding. Dr. Van Abel does the work of the Lord. I really feel I was sent to her from up above. Many people consider their sports idols heroes, but none of us have ever needed a sports figure, but many of us need a hero like her. I am six weeks now past my surgery and I am eating and swallowing at probably 98% before. my left shoulder is weak, as they mentioned as a possible problem with the neck dissection, when I open my mouth, my lower left lip doesn’t seem to go down far enough and when I eat, I need to pull it down or move to the right side, otherwise I’ll bite my lip. My neck is numb from my jaw down to where the incision was made also. My hope is most of these things will go away overtime. After my surgery, the pathology on my lymph nodes and the tumor were negative (no chemo or radiation was needed) , but I have a PET scan in another two months and I’m hoping that is negative and then maybe I’m out of the woods. If you are having this surgery, it will be rough the first couple weeks as far as eating. Amazingly though I never took any pain medication after I left the hospital in two days. I thought the pain where the tumor was cut out would be much worse than what it was. My tumor was at the base of my tongue. everybody, and I mean, everybody was so amazing here at the Mayo Clinic. I am so lucky I ended up here as I was referred to Madison Wisconsin by my oncologist first and they told me there they wouldn’t even do tors on me. They told me they were going to cut my neck open and access to to her that way, but I was to wait a week for their tumor board decision and then they wanted to use radiation. This was certainly not the correct decision for me.