A friend of my 23 year old daughter has had a needle biopsy of cervical lymph glands and an upper head/neck CT scan done recently. She is scheduled for removal of neck lymph glands this coming week and has not had anything explained to her about what was found or why this procedure. Could you shed some light on what to expect or a way to proceed to get some answers? She is a single mom and is worried.
It is a pretty involved procedure. It would only be done with a serious condition generally cancer as part of a larger set of other treatments for cancer. What else is done, and the prognosis varies from intensive chemotherapy and some radiation but maybe not any hospitalizations (Hodgkin's) to radiation, chemotherapy, bone marrow transplant, long hospitalizations and at best only a 50/50 shot of surviving 3 years (some lymphomas) to pretty hopeless (lung cancer; which would be under 1 in a million women under 20, so, that's quite doubtful and lymph node removal isn't part of the treatment for it)