“I thought it was stress”: He sees sores in his mouth and eventually has his tongue amputated and reconstructed due to cancer

At the age of 18, in August 2019, a girl began to search for answers to the pain caused by sores that she saw on her tongue.

Rachel Morton, a psychiatry student, thought her stomach ulcers were the result of the stress of college exams.

By 2020, he started noticing that one side of his tongue was starting to ‘deform’. The pain did not go away, despite treatment with antibiotics and analgesics. Soon he found he couldn’t even drink water.

In the end, he received the least expected diagnosis: cancer.

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Remove and reconstruct tongue for cancer

The hard reason for his ailment was heard with a week to go before Christmas 2020.

He had seen a dentist and telephoned other specialists, but they could not find the cause of the sores. The biopsy cleared the doubts.

A doctor explained to him that two-thirds of his tongue had to be removed, the Daily Mail reports.

The sores weren’t the only thing that worried him. She says that “her lips were also swollen, she was extremely tired and had a rash around her mouth, which she attributed to the stress of the exams.”

Then he started getting ear infections, sinusitis and sore tonsils.

When he received news that part of his tongue would be removed, he knew the process would require reconstruction of what had been removed “using tissue from one of his legs”.

The British media explain that the psychiatry student underwent ten different operations in a session of 16 hours to intervene in the jaw and remove two thirds of the tongue and lymph nodes.

The surgeons used some muscles and blood vessels from one leg to reconstruct his tongue, as well as the arteries and veins in his neck.”

The operation considered that they first tried to take tissue from a calf, “but after it was not viable, they used the thigh, so most of his left leg was operated on.”

They performed a tracheostomy and a feeding tube was placed in her stomach for about nine months.

On March 1, 2021, the first of two chemotherapy courses started. After undergoing the invasive procedure to reconstruct her tongue, in addition to two rounds of chemotherapy and 30 radiation treatments, she was declared cancer-free in June 2021.

Creating cancer awareness

After his “life-saving” surgery, Morton had to relearn how to walk and talk, surprisingly he took no time off from studying and only returned to online lectures four days later. .

He went to speech therapy for six months, the publication says. Two years after finishing treatment, the young woman, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, says she is working “to raise awareness about the symptoms of tongue cancer and the importance of health care”.

The girl remembers that in those moments of uncertainty, a doctor came to tell her: in fact, there is nothing else we can do

Over time, Rachel Morton thinks about raising awareness about the disease.

Whoever broke the news “had never spoken to anyone as young as me with tongue cancer. He said he had only treated people over 60, mostly men, who had been smoking and drinking all their lives.”