Featured Image Credit: SWNS
Topics: Cancer, Health, NHS, Mental Health, Tattoos
Jen Thomas
A woman who underwent gruelling surgery and woke up to find her arm tattoo is now on her tongue explains how it happened.
Harriet Trewhitt, 21, is an acting student and support worker from Northallerton in North Yorkshire.
The budding actor had been suffering with what she thought was just a painful mouth ulcer for months.
''It was May this year that I was diagnosed, I got an ulcer in December 2024 and didn’t think much about it," she recalled.
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"The doctors sent me to the dentist, who then sent me to A&E," and she said they originally thought it was 'trauma from my seizures from where I bite my tongue'.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be something much worse: ''When it didn’t heal they rushed me for a biopsy and discovered it was squamous cell carcinoma."
It was cancerous, and required urgent treatment.
Years earlier, on her 18th birthday, Harriet had a symbolic tattoo done of a semi-colon.
The symbol has been adopted by many people who have depression, as it portrays resilience.
She said: “I’ve had severe depression and anxiety since I was 12-years-old or so. A semi colon is used when authors want to end a sentence but carry on.
"The person is the author and the semi colon is their life. It’s a person wanting to end their life but they’ve decided to carry on."
“I got the tattoo two days after I turned 18," Harriet remembered.
Her cancer meant she needed a skin graft, and went through a gruelling six-hour emergency operation to rebuild her tongue.
Doctors at University College London used skin from her left forearm, which included the semi-colon tattoo, to reconstruct her mouth.
When Harriet woke up after surgery, she found her beloved tattoo was now on the bottom of her tongue.
She explained: “They took skin and blood vessels from my left arm and reconstructed half of my tongue. I didn’t know you could do that until they did.
''They tried to do it with from my leg but there was too much fatty tissue. I did ask if they could do it on my right arm, but they said they couldn't."
Talking about the new placement, she said: "Now it’s on the right side of my tongue, underneath and towards the back.
“It’s just a kind of a weird thing about me to have it there now, but it doesn't bother me."
She was missing the tattoo on her arm though, so went and had it inked again on her right arm instead.
The surgery has left her with flashbacks and painful memories.
“Initially the recovery was very difficult. It’s a time that I do deal with a lot of flashbacks. When I went into surgery I got intubated which was very scary.
“I was very lucky with the team at the university college in London, they were so caring and kind.
''My friend got up at 3am to be with me in London for the first time for my first surgery, I was in hospital for ten days but I was trying to get out of there as long as possible.
“With the reconstruction my salivary glands have been affected more than I thought, but you can learn to live with it," she added.
Following the surgery, she required months of speech therapy to regain her voice.
“We did a performance of Anything Goes in October, which was incredible. To be able to do it without an issue was incredible.”