LOST FOR WORDS

Rebecca Patterson, 38, from Nottingham, worried she’d never be able to speak again.

- KATIE PEARSON

Reclining in the chair, my eyes flicked from one side of the room to the other as the dentist poked around in my mouth.

‘I’m going to refer you for a biopsy,’ he said.

It was 2015, and I’d had the same white patch on my tongue for almost five years.

To be honest, I was pretty unfazed by the whole thing.

It didn’t hurt and you could barely see it.

And when the biopsy returned a diagnosis of oral thrush, I still wasn’t too worried.

I was prescribed medication and the mark soon disappeared.

Sorted.

Only, the ghostly patch, around two millimetres, returned a month later.

And this time, I decided to leave it, hoping it would sort itself out.

But by November 2017, I was feeling exhausted.

‘You’re looking thinner, too,’ my boyfriend Craig, then 29, remarked.

I’d lost 1st 7lb, but I put it down to stress.

Working with special-needs students in a secondary school, I was under a lot of pressure.

Only by now, the white blemish on my tongue was getting bigger than ever.

By February 2018, my health was deteriorating.

After arriving back home from a holiday in Italy, I felt really sick and couldn’t stop retching.

As I lay on the sofa in pain, I could see bright lights and images above me.

I was hallucinating.

Then the next morning, I noticed two new lumps on my tongue.