Anyone had neck dissection surgery? What are your tips?
Neck malignant lymph node cancer recurrence
I have a recurrence of lymph node cancer in my neck and am trying to determine if I want to risk complications from the surgery. Has anyone had this neck dissection surgery? What went well, and what did not go well? Would you recommend doing it, with a flap proposed, or not? Thank you.
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The neck dissection was not the hardest part of my surgery, so really the other issues obscured that part. Swallowing was a little hard but more due to the facial paralysis effects on my tongue than the neck dissection. I was eating soft food 3 days later, only delayed by my nausea from pain meds. I did a lot of treatment to the incision with scar meds afterward, like Mederma, and did some stretching exercises suggested. The dry mouth issue is the only ongoing one, and there are plenty of treatments for that to help. I am using Biotene xylitol tablets currently and that gets me through most nights.
This is very helpful - !!! Did you have a flap performed with your surgery?
I initially had this throat cancer in 2020 and had the full radiaiton treatments and chemo. Now that it has come back, I cannot do radiation again, plus it will now complicate the surgery. First I must have a lung biopsy, as something is going on in my lungs. We hope it is simply inflammation.
I hope you are doing well, I had exactly the same treatment as you.. only many years before... year 2000. for me the surgery was not bad, it was the effects of radiation,,, after 22 years, I still have extreme difficulty swallowing food due to very little saliva. I have learned to live with it .. Need to take many supplements to make up for what nutrients I cannot ingest orally ... I did have three feeding tubes during this time and now I can drink what I used to put in the feeding tubes. X-rays shows I have a shrunken stomach so my intake is very small amounts several times a day. I truly hope you are doing better than I since your surgery was 20 years after mine. take care
No, there was no flap. I can't help you about that.
My mother has a neck bisection? In 1989 with MD Anderson in Houston and she’s 83 . As someone earlier said MD Anderson.
I had a neck dissection for removal of a squamous cell cancer of the parotid this year. Now undergoing proton beam therapy to the area. I realize that proton beam therapy is relatively new, but does anyone have experience regarding the long-term consequences of proton beam therapy? Are they different than the long term effects of X-ray or photon beam therapy?