Articles

Most of the articles I have written about free flap reconstruction focus on the procedure itself or on the hospital stay. Those are important, but they cover only the first week or two of what is a much longer process. Patients who have completed the acute phase of recovery — who are home, healing, and past the early milestones — often find themselves with a new set of questions: When will the swelling go down? Why does the reconstructed area feel numb? When can I eat normall

When you are diagnosed with head and neck cancer, the decisions that follow are among the most important of your life. Which surgery is needed? Does radiation come first, or after? What about chemotherapy? These questions rarely have a single obvious answer, and the right plan depends on details that no one specialist can fully evaluate alone. This is why, before your treatment begins, your case is almost certainly being discussed by a group of specialists who have never met

For many patients, surgery is not the end of treatment — it’s the beginning of a longer road. When I perform a major head and neck cancer resection, one of the questions I hear most often in the days that follow is: Will I need radiation? It depends, and the recommendation comes from a careful review of your pathology, your anatomy, and your overall health. If radiation is recommended, knowing what to expect — why it’s done, what it feels like, and how to get through it — ma

Major head and neck surgery — whether a jaw reconstruction, a neck dissection, a robotic resection of an oropharyngeal tumor, or a procedure requiring a free flap — is not a small undertaking. The operations themselves can range from three to twelve or more hours in the operating room, often followed by several days in an intensive care unit and a hospital stay measured in weeks, not days. What happens before you ever arrive at the hospital matters more than most patients rea

The pathology report arrives a few days after surgery. It is a dense, jargon-heavy document, usually two or three pages, and it contains information that will shape every treatment decision that follows. Most patients have never seen one before. The language — margins, lymphovascular invasion, extranodal extension, perineural invasion — is clinical shorthand that carries real weight, and trying to parse it alone, at home, the night before your follow-up appointment, is not a

Surgery for head and neck cancer that involves free flap reconstruction is among the most complex procedures in our field. The operation itself — removing a tumor, rebuilding the defect with tissue transferred from another part of the body, and connecting that tissue to a new blood supply using microsurgery — is a significant undertaking. Patients and families who have been told this is the plan often have a clear question: what actually happens afterward? What does the hospi

If you've been diagnosed with head and neck cancer, there's a good chance your surgeon has mentioned a neck dissection — either as part of your planned treatment or as a possibility depending on what other tests show. For many patients, this is one of the more intimidating-sounding aspects of the operation. The phrase itself sounds significant. It is significant, but it is also one of the most commonly performed and well-established procedures in head and neck cancer surgery,

Being told you may have cancer of the head or neck is one of the most frightening experiences a person can face. The diagnosis often comes suddenly — a biopsy result from your dentist or ENT, an unexpected finding on imaging, or a neck mass that won’t go away. What happens next can feel overwhelming, and one of the most common sources of anxiety is simply not knowing what to expect. This article walks you through what a typical first consultation with a head and neck surgeon