Woman relearning to speak after tongue cancer diagnosis

By Jack Fifield

A young woman will have to learn to eat and talk again after her mouth ulcers were revealed to be tongue cancer.

Olivia Donnelly, 25, received the devastating diagnosis last year - saying she initally feared she was going to die.

The recruiter, from Dover, Kent, is now facing a two-week stay in hospital during which doctors will take out 40 percent of her tongue and rebuild it using skin from her wrist.

She will then have to be fed through a tube in her nose until she can learn to eat again, and therapists will have to teach her how to speak again.

Olivia first started experiencing pain at the beginning of 2024 and spent over a year pushing for a diagnosis.

But it was only after a trip to the dentist that she was sent for a biopsy, which later revealed the tongue cancer.

Reliving the moment she was told the bad news, Olivia said:“ My heart just sank. I was kind of prepared for them to tell me that – I knew something was wrong, I had a gut feeling.

“I was crying, they were telling me all of this stuff and I wasn’t really taking it in, I was staring into space and crying.

“I basically said ‘what do I do now?’.I didn’t know what to do. The next thing you know, the Macmillan team came in.

“That’s when it really hit me, when they came in. I just said to them ‘am I going to die? They said ‘no, you’re not going to die.’

“I said ‘can you promise me I won’t die?’ and the lady said ‘we promise you you’re not going to die’.

“Them saying those words did help me, but that night knowing I had cancer I was scared to sleep – I thought it was going to kill me.

“After that initial first night, I didn’t have those thoughts.”

Olivia says the ulcers left her "crying her eyes out" in the early stages, and would appear the disappear seemingly without reason.

Doctors were stumped, and suggested Olivia could have a vitamin B12 deficiency.

She was also tested her for chronic illnesses including Crohn’s disease and diabetes, but blood tests came back negative.

In the meantime, the full-time recruiter was struggling to speak to clients at work and was having trouble eating – despite a doctor-prescribed steroid tablet to ease the pain.

It wasn’t until a visit to the dentist towards the end of 2024 that she was finally referred to specialists at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford.

More from this section

+2

Messy homes sabotaging Americans’ weekend

+3

80-year-old nurse still working 60-hours a week: ‘I have no plans to retire’

+3

How a video game can help improve doctors’ decisions

There, in January 2025, she had a biopsy – which showed she had oral lichen planus, an inflammatory condition which can raise the risk of getting mouth cancer.

Olivia said: “The next few months after that, my mouth didn’t have as many ulcers.

“I thought, ‘hold on, they might have cut something out when they did the biopsy’.”

But, seven months later, in August last year, her ulcers began to flare up again.

Hospital specialists said they may be caused by her teeth rubbing on her tongue.

Olivia added: “I was given a mouth guard to use at night time, but that wasn’t doing anything.

“And in January this year, I noticed a lump.

“That’s when I said ‘something’s wrong’.”

In place of her previous ulcers, Olivia said a ‘hard lump’ had appeared on the left-hand side of her tongue – so she urgently made another hospital appointment for the next month, February.

Olivia said the specialist brought up a photo of her mouth from a year prior and compared it to her current condition, and ordered another biopsy after noting that the lump had grown.

She said: “He said ‘we’re going to do another biopsy, but please don’t worry about it because I don’t think it looks like cancer, I just want to rule it out for you and see if there’s anything else it picks up’.”

Following her biopsy in March, Olivia was told she could expect results in six to eight weeks.

But when she got a call two weeks later, she knew it wasn’t good news.

She said: “That’s when I knew something was wrong, because why would you call me into hospital that early?”

Olivia said she doesn’t know whether her cancer diagnosis was previously missed – but she understands why it might have been, given how rare tongue cancer is in young people.

She said: “Has this been happening for a few months, or has this been happening for a long time and they missed it in my biopsy in January 2025?

“Unfortunately I’ll never know the answer to that, and it is what it is.”

Now, she’s encouraging others to know the signs of the disease and to push doctors for further tests if you think something is wrong.

Earlier this month, Olivia posted a video to TikTok detailing her journey – and it’s already received more than 50,000 views.