A woman whose arm tattoo ended up on her tongue as part of reconstructive surgery during cancer treatment says the story makes a “good dating anecdote”.
Harriet Trewhitt, 21, was diagnosed earlier this year after developing a painful ulcer on her tongue.
At first, the acting student thought the lesion was just a result of biting her tongue during an epileptic seizure, but doctors decided to biopsy the area and found stage two squamous cell carcinoma.
“They took out half of my tongue and then they took skin from my arm and the blood vessels from my arm and reconstructed it,” she explains.
“It was all so unbelievable, so when I saw it I was surprised but also laughed at how crazy it was.
“I wasn’t laughing though when I saw the state of my arm from where they took it from,” she adds.
Harriet, from Northallerton in North Yorkshire, says the diagnosis a month after the biopsy was a “shock”.
Recovering her poise, she asked the medical team if she could wait 10 days before treatment in order to finish her drama course at LMA Drama School to avoid redoing the year again.
“Thankfully they let me finish drama school. That was on the Thursday (22 May) and I had my first operation on the Tuesday (27 May) but during those days they were doing loads of tests, MRIs, CTs and tests to make sure that I’d be OK to be under anaesthesia for as long as I was,” she recalls.
Harriet underwent a six-hour procedure at University College London Hospital to remove the cancer from her mouth, which involved removing half her tongue and rebuilding it with skin – including the tattoo – from her arm.
After removing the flesh, she said surgeons then “just pulled the skin from my arm together and then stitched it all up”.
“I had a small semicolon tattoo. And when they took the skin, they also took that as well.
“I just thought it was funny. I tried to stay very positive throughout the whole ordeal, because I felt that was the only way I could cope was making jokes, that was the best way for me to cope with it all,” she says.
After two days, surgeons found the reconstruction hadn’t been successful, so Harriet went back in for treatment.
“I had emergency surgery because the blood vessels hadn’t connected properly,” she says.
“So they had to go in and reconstruct that and also fix my lymph nodes that had been damaged during the first surgery.”
Since then she has had to relearn how to talk and swallow before undergoing more treatment in the form of proton beam therapy – a type of radiotherapy that uses protons instead of X-rays, which are directed to stop precisely inside the tumour – at The Christie Hospital in Manchester.
“It was an incredible treatment.
“I had a mask that was moulded around my face and my chest that I wore every time I went in and it got like attached to a board and then this machine moved around me,” she explains.
Harriet says she paused a day of treatment for her graduation, because achieving the degree had been a big challenge.
“If you looked at me I looked perfectly fine but inside I was in so much pain and I was so tired. I was like ‘I’m just trying to get through the day and see my friends and take pictures and have fun with them’.
“You can’t see the pain, but I can remember the pain afterwards, because I could barely eat at that point, I was in so much pain.”
Now Harriet is back home hopes to begin a master’s degree at Derby University in drama therapy in 2026.
“I’m a lot better. I do have a bit of a lisp. But apart from that, the tiredness is still a very big issue,” she says.
“But as people keep saying, well, you only finished surgery back in August. So even though that feels like a world away, it’s actually not that long ago.”
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