One year ago today, I went into surgery expecting that I’d lose half my tongue to a squamous cell carcinoma recurrence. The evening before, Bess and I got legally married;[1] it was a short, but charming, crash ceremony. I say “crash ceremony” because we wanted to marry before surgery, and on afternoon of May 24 I learned a spot had opened for the next day. It was only luck—if you could call any part of this story “lucky”—that Bess and I had picked up our marriage license a few days earlier, expecting to wed sometime before the planned surgery date of June 8 or 9.  

The tumor itself has only been confirmed on May 11: I got a “hot” PET scan on April 26. Mayo Phoenix initially scheduled follow-up CT scans a few weeks later to figure out what was going on, but Dr. Hinni, the ENT surgeon at Mayo who saved my life, did not like that delay (he dislikes any delay, a trait which has likely saved my life on several occasions) and ordered them stat, so on May 1 I went in to find out whether I was likely to live or die.