My husband at 27 was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma on his tongue. As per his surgeon he was the youngest he had seen at that time with this diagnosis.

He was and still is prone to canker sores in his mouth as is the rest of his family. This one just wasn't going away and was really sore and started to look like pitted and different from normal so he finally went to the Dr for a biopsy.

Ended up with stage 2 on the cusp of stage 3 cancer. Two weeks later was in surgery to remove a little over half of his tongue, take out all of the lymph nodes on the left side of his neck and rebuild his tongue using a radial forearm free flap reconstruction graft. He was lucky no cancer had spread so no chemo or radiation, and has been in remission for 11 years now.

He now has a two toned tongue that grows hair on the side that has the skin graft, has issues with a couple of words, and finds small food gets stuck on his graft side since there is no feeling anymore. Also has no feeling on the outside of that side of his face and neck and has some permanent nerve damage in his shoulder from when he was immobilized waiting for everything to heal but all in all he was super lucky.

He now goes to an ENT Dr anytime anything feels out of the ordinary to get checked, better safe then sorry.

Sorry for any structural or spelling I'm on my phone.