I am also new to this board. My mother has stage 4 laryngeal cancer and has been battling it it for 6 months although I suspected she has known about it or was somewhat awarr of it for well over 4-6 months before that. I thought she might have cancer as I watched her health go down the toilet ( 30 year smoker ) . Until one night when I was watching her virtually fall face first into the floor while sitting down I had to tell her she was full of BS and I was going to call the ambulance anyway. So we ended up in the emergency room 2 oclock in the morning and they gave her some O 2 and a breathing treatment and opened her airway up some. They sent her home the next day ( same day really ) and we decided to take her to a real hospital, as the one we were in before was questionable at best, but closest at hand. When we got her there they were shocked at how impeded her airway was and immediately did an emergency tracheostomy ( no anesthetic ). A long story somewhat short, that was January and since then we have been trying to start chemo and radiation. In the process of doing both of those things she has had a anaphalactic reaction to the first Chemo ( herbatox) and an antibiotic resistant infection. All through that the tumor got too large to treat with radiation so now we are treating it with a different chemo to shrink it so that it can be irradiated also. Enough doom and gloom though ( plenty of that to go around stay strong cry if u need to when you get a minute to yourself ) this chemo is shrinking the cancer so I'll just take what I can get.