Backstory

Now that a few more people are finding out what's going on, I've been getting questions on how I found out about the cancer. Well,...

In June, I went to the dentist to get fitted for a mouthguard because I thought that I was just chewing on my tongue in my sleep. Dr. Carol Lam (who is absolutely wonderful and has a great office in the Fine Arts Bldg. downtown) referred me to an oral surgeon because she was concerned with how the sore looked.

So I went to Dr. Elizabeth Ebner, who performed a biopsy and sent the tissue to the lab. If you ever need your tongue sliced, go to Dr. Ebner. She works fast and isn't stingy with the Novacaine (plus she prescribed this great cherry shake type thing that really kept the swelling down so I could sleep). A week later, the results came back, and I found out I had a squamous cell carcinoma. That was on July 2nd.

Since then it's been all about getting my appointments with Kaiser as quickly as possible. In this case, Eric V in Senator Boxer's San Francisco office has been an ANGEL setting 3-foot flames under the folks at Kaiser's radiation/oncology department, so I wasn't waiting all summer for my appointments.

And that pretty much brings all of us up to speed.