Tongue cancer could be mistaken for canker sore: Here are the signs not to miss

Most of us hope that the tiny physical ailments and discomforts that we might experience now and then are small blimps in our otherwise healthy life. However, for some, things do unfortunately take a dark turn.

Stories like that are sadly aplenty: a man got bitten by a spider and nearly lost his leg, while in another case, a person went blind because of a bad habit he had. In another case, a woman's blocked ear turned out to be caused by something truly out of a horror movie.

Today reported on another case on similar lines. A 35-year-old woman thought she was suffering from an annoying sore on her tongue, but it actually turned out to be something much more dangerous.

Woman suffered from canker sores that didn't heal

Back in 2020, Katie Drablos, a dancer and choreographer from New York City noticed that she had a mouth sore in the back of her tongue that just didn't seem to heal. But it didn't seem like a cause for concern, so much so that she didn't even mention it to her dentist.

But the sore started being painful, and by January 2021, she felt constant pain in the area with the sore. She explained why she was not alarmed for so long,

What was visible on the outside of my tongue was this sore that was weird looking. Because of the placement, it was hard for me to see it. If it had been on the tip of my tongue, I’d probably would have been like, ‘Oh that doesn’t exactly look like a normal canker sore.’

When she went to the doctor, she was prescribed antibiotics, but it seemed to do nothing to alleviate her discomfort long term.

What the canker sore actually was

Drablos then took an appointment with an ENT specialist, Dr. Diana Kirke, an otolaryngologist at Mount Sinai Hospital. The doctor took one look at the sore, and informed the patient they would do a biopsy asap. Drablos recalls,

Within one second she was like, ‘We’re going to biopsy this right now.

(I thought) this was more serious than I predicted.

The biopsy revealed she actually had stage 2 tongue cancer! Drablos had to undergo a long and painful process of surgery and physical recovery that included neck dissection, tracheostomy, radiation and chemotherapy, as the cancer spread and reached stage 4. Luckily, she survived her ordeal, finishing her treatment in June 2021, and has been healing and rebuilding her health and career since.

Symptoms of tongue cancer as per Dr. Kirke include,

• Persistent tongue pain
• An ulcer that lasts more than two to four weeks
• Bleeding from the ulcer

Read more:

⋙ This woman left traumatized after waking up during surgery 'I was screaming, but in my head'

⋙ This woman's eye infection turned out to be something worse: 'I could see them moving across my eye'

⋙ This woman was told she had haemorrhoids but her real disease led to much worse

Sources used:

Today: 'This 35-year-old’s canker sore wouldn’t go away. It was stage 4 tongue cancer'