Young Tongues

Tara Hanley was used to being the nurse — not the patient.

In this episode, Tara joins Barbara to share her journey from a persistent tongue ulcer and repeated biopsies to eventually hearing the words: “It’s cancer.”
As a public health nurse and mum of two young children, Tara talks candidly about trying to stay positive for everyone around her while privately confronting her own fears. She shares how she prepared her children for surgery, why she recorded herself reading their favourite stories before treatment, and what it was like returning to work and everyday life afterwards.

They also explore the parts of recovery that others don’t always see: scanxiety, lymphoedema, changes to eating and speech, survivor guilt, and the strange experience of everyone else moving on while you’re only beginning to process what happened.

Warm, funny and deeply relatable, this is a conversation about becoming the patient, finding your new normal and recognising that you don’t have to have had the “worst” cancer experience for it to have changed your life.

💬 Need Support?
If you’ve been diagnosed with tongue cancer (or are supporting someone who has), you can find help here:
🌍 Website
🤝 Join support groups & mailing list: via the website
💌 Contact us: podcast@youngtonguesglobal.com

📢 Get Involved
We’re building this with our community — and you can be part of it:
✨ Volunteer & share your experience
🎙️ Apply to appear on the podcast
🧠 Take part in research opportunities

💛 Support Our Work
We’re a small charity with a big mission — and we rely on community support to keep going.
👉 Find out more how to make a donation or fundraise for us here

📲 Follow & Connect
Instagram | Facebook | TikTok | Mailing List
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What happens when an everyday cold meets a body that’s been through tongue cancer treatment?

With Barbara away, Stef and Jamie have been left in charge of the podcast — which may or may not have been a terrible decision.

After Stef is struck down by a particularly nasty cold, they get talking about something that probably feels very familiar to many people in the Young Tongues community: being ill after treatment just isn’t the same as it was before.

Dry mouth gets drier. Swallowing becomes harder. Coughing, sneezing and clearing phlegm can suddenly become a logistical operation. Medication isn’t always easy to take. And when familiar pains return — particularly around the ear, jaw or neck — an innocent virus can also bring some very unwelcome thoughts about recurrence.
Stef and Jamie talk candidly about the long-term realities of treatment, invisible side effects, fatigue, learning to give yourself permission to rest, and why friends and family may not always understand just how much effort goes into appearing “normal.”

There are also saline sprays, emotional-support water bottles, disastrous food choices, humidifier experiments, “mouth lube” and considerably more discussion of bodily functions than Barbara would probably have authorised.

It’s honest, occasionally gross, surprisingly funny and ultimately a reminder of why we talk about this stuff in the first place.

Because however weird the side effect, however ridiculous the situation, and however many years it’s been since treatment — chances are, another Young Tongue gets it.

💬 Need Support?
If you’ve been diagnosed with tongue cancer (or are supporting someone who has), you can find help here:
🌍 Website
🤝 Join support groups & mailing list: via the website
💌 Contact us: podcast@youngtonguesglobal.com

📢 Get Involved
We’re building this with our community — and you can be part of it:
✨ Volunteer & share your experience
🎙️ Apply to appear on the podcast
🧠 Take part in research opportunities

💛 Support Our Work
We’re a small charity with a big mission — and we rely on community support to keep going.
👉 Find out more how to make a donation or fundraise for us here

📲 Follow & Connect
Instagram | Facebook | TikTok | Mailing List
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last week on The Young Tongues Podcast, Dr Patrick Ha helped us understand the science behind adenoid cystic carcinoma (ACC) – an incredibly rare form of cancer that can affect the tongue.

This week, we hear what it can actually mean to live through it.

Barbara is joined by Young Tongues member Sonya, who was diagnosed with ACC at the base of her tongue four years ago after experiencing jaw pain for several years and initially being treated for TMJ. Her eventual diagnosis came in terrifying circumstances, following a medical emergency that nearly cost Sonya her life. She went on to undergo a 100% glossectomy and laryngectomy, followed by radiotherapy, and today continues to live with and receive treatment for metastatic disease in her lungs.

But this episode is about so much more than cancer treatment.

Sonya speaks with remarkable openness – and plenty of her trademark humour – about losing her tongue and natural voice, learning to communicate differently, adjusting to a completely changed relationship with food, stepping away from a career that had been central to her identity, and figuring out who she was when productivity could no longer define her worth.

A central part of Sonya's story is voice banking and virtual voicing. Before surgery, she had just a few weeks to discover that voice banking even existed and record as much of her voice as she could. Today, advances in AI allow Sonya to communicate using a cloned version of her own voice – technology she says has given her not only a voice, but confidence, independence and a sense of identity.

💬 Need Support?
If you’ve been diagnosed with tongue cancer (or are supporting someone who has), you can find help here:
🌍 Website
🤝 Join support groups & mailing list: via the website
💌 Contact us: podcast@youngtonguesglobal.com

📢 Get Involved
We’re building this with our community — and you can be part of it:
✨ Volunteer & share your experience
🎙️ Apply to appear on the podcast
🧠 Take part in research opportunities

💛 Support Our Work
We’re a small charity with a big mission — and we rely on community support to keep going.
👉 Find out more how to make a donation or fundraise for us here

📲 Follow & Connect
Instagram | Facebook | TikTok | Mailing List
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most conversations about tongue cancer – including many on The Young Tongues Podcast – focus on squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). But SCC isn't the only cancer that can affect the tongue.

In this episode, we're turning our attention to an even rarer diagnosis: adenoid cystic carcinoma (ACC).

As the number of people affected by ACC within the Young Tongues community grows, we wanted to better understand this very different disease and give our community reliable, accessible information from someone who knows it well.

Barbara is joined by Dr Patrick Ha, Chief of the Division of Head and Neck Surgical Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco, whose research includes the molecular changes that occur in adenoid cystic carcinoma.

Together, they take ACC right back to basics. What exactly is it? How can a cancer of the salivary glands affect the tongue? How does it differ from the much more common SCC – and why can diagnosis sometimes be so difficult?

They explore how ACC behaves, including its tendency in some people to grow slowly while still carrying the possibility of recurrence or metastasis many years later. Patrick explains perineural invasion, staging, surgery, radiotherapy and why long-term surveillance can look very different for someone with ACC. They also tackle one of the hardest concepts for patients to come to terms with: why doctors may sometimes choose to monitor metastatic ACC rather than treat it immediately – and how balancing treatment against quality of life can make “watch and wait” the right clinical decision, even when psychologically it can be incredibly difficult.

The conversation also covers prognosis and why population statistics don't necessarily tell an individual patient what their future will look like, before turning to research and some of the emerging science offering hope for more targeted ACC treatments in the future.

🎙️ This is the first of two Young Tongues episodes dedicated to ACC. In our next episode, we'll move from the clinical perspective to lived experience, as Young Tongues member Sonia shares her own story of living with ACC.

💬 Need Support?
If you’ve been diagnosed with tongue cancer (or are supporting someone who has), you can find help here:
🌍 Website
🤝 Join support groups & mailing list: via the website
💌 Contact us: podcast@youngtonguesglobal.com

📢 Get Involved
We’re building this with our community — and you can be part of it:
✨ Volunteer & share your experience
🎙️ Apply to appear on the podcast
🧠 Take part in research opportunities

💛 Support Our Work
We’re a small charity with a big mission — and we rely on community support to keep going.
👉 Find out more how to make a donation or fundraise for us here

📲 Follow & Connect
Instagram | Facebook | TikTok | Mailing List
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Scanxiety. If you’ve been through cancer, chances are you know the feeling all too well.

In this panel episode of The Young Tongues Podcast, Barbara is joined by Young Tongues members Kelly and Noah for an open conversation about the anxiety that can surround scans, check-ups and the possibility of recurrence.

Together, they explore what scanxiety actually feels like – from the physical tension and hypervigilance to analysing every new ache, pain or change in your body. They talk about the strange limbo of living from one appointment to the next, the agonising wait for results, and how a previous recurrence or difficult diagnosis experience can fundamentally change the way you respond to reassurance and statistics.

Kelly shares the additional complexity of scanxiety after experiencing a recurrence that was discovered on a scan, while Noah reflects on being just a few years out from treatment and learning how to balance vigilance with not allowing fear to take over his life. Barbara brings the perspective of being seven years post-treatment and how her relationship with follow-up appointments – and her own body – has gradually changed over time.

The panel also discusses access to scan results, patient portals, communication from healthcare teams, advocating for what you need from your clinicians, and the mixed emotions that come when appointments finally become less frequent. Most importantly, this is a conversation about learning to live in the space between check-ups: recognising when something genuinely needs investigating while finding ways to stop cancer from occupying every corner of your life.

💬 Need Support?
If you’ve been diagnosed with tongue cancer (or are supporting someone who has), you can find help here:
🌍 Website
🤝 Join support groups & mailing list: via the website
💌 Contact us: podcast@youngtonguesglobal.com

📢 Get Involved
We’re building this with our community — and you can be part of it:
✨ Volunteer & share your experience
🎙️ Apply to appear on the podcast
🧠 Take part in research opportunities

💛 Support Our Work
We’re a small charity with a big mission — and we rely on community support to keep going.
👉 Find out more how to make a donation or fundraise for us here

📲 Follow & Connect
Instagram | Facebook | TikTok | Mailing List
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.