I Ran Marathons Until I Got Oral Cancer.
Chocolate Cat Tongues Helped Me Heal.
The candy box is flat and pale yellow; on it, five blue-eyed kittens glare with disapproval at an unseen photographer. “Katzenzungen.” I read the raised gold font as my friend looks on, her excitement over the birthday gift barely contained. “Cat tongues?” I translate.
“Yes!” she cries. “Aren’t they adorable?”
Adorable? No. Humiliating? Absolutely.
Twelve years ago, I ignored a sore spot on my tongue for months. My husband and I, wanting to immerse our adopted four-year-old in the culture of her birth mother, rented out our Oregon cottage and moved to Costa Rica with her. But homesickness for her friends and her cats made her miserable. After 10 weeks, we returned to Oregon and moved into an apartment until the end of our tenant’s lease. In all the chaos, I barely registered my aching tongue. At last, I went to the dentist.
The man took one look and clasped my shoulder. “Oh, mama,” he sighed and sent me to a surgeon who biopsied the sore and declared it cancerous.
“How could this happen?” I demanded. “I run marathons! I’ve never smoked a cigarette. I barely drink.”
“And you’re HPV-negative.” The surgeon shrugged. “It’s just bad luck.”
Still, I blamed myself — my anxiety as an adoptive mother of a traumatized child, my occasional rum and Coke in a can while beachside in Costa Rica. I told no one but my husband and a few close friends of my diagnosis. Shame and terror silenced me.
There is no ribbon for tongue cancer. While my girlfriends headed out for benefit 5Ks with pink satin loops on their shirts, I ran alone in the weeks before my surgery. Over and over, I thought of my husband’s favorite Herman Hesse quote: “You are to listen to the cursed radio music of life and to reverence the spirit behind it and to laugh at its distortions.” But I could not find the spirit behind this cancer; I could not laugh at my poor, distorted tongue.
Tongues have always struck me as more intimate than genitalia, and more disturbing. I was a kid when Ozzy Osbourne rose to fame with his enormous pink tongue draped over his chin like a slug. In first grade, a bully pushed one of my classmates into a water fountain and a spigot-defect sliced his tongue half-off. As a sensitive tween, I waited in my mother’s VW bus as she pumped gas, and a stranger bugged out his eyes and stuck out his tongue at me; the aggressive image haunted me for weeks. I’d much rather receive a middle finger than a glimpse of this problematic organ in somebody’s mouth.
Unaware of my horror, my friend has graciously gifted me a box of Katzenzungen because I have five cats and used to write for Cat Fancy. “These are a novelty gift in Europe,” she explains. A glance at our phones confirms that in the late 1800s, Swiss Hungarian confectioner Emil Gerbeaud likely invented cat tongue candies, serving them in his Budapest café. Why,” I wonder aloud, “would a confectioner famous for introducing chocolate-covered cherries to Hungary opt to mold candy into the bristly muscular organ responsible for de-furring a freshly-caught mouse?”
And yet, the Australian company Küfferle has made Katzenzungen for well over a hundred years, as has the German company Sarotti. I slide the tray from the box my friend has given me to reveal 20 chocolate pieces — each molded into an hourglass shape three inches long. I put one in my mouth and let it melt on my perpetually-aching tongue.
Twelve years before, the surgeon removed a dime-sized piece and replaced it with muscle and tendon from the inside of my forearm, leaving an eight-inch scar. I looked like I’d attempted to slit my wrist while sneezing. He also sliced into my neck to test lymph nodes, leaving another ugly scar. When my daughter’s first-grade friends stared and their parents slid their eyes away from my neck, I silenced potential questions with two words. “Cougar attack.”
Though I couldn’t speak clearly for two months, I returned to teaching my journalism classes at the university, afraid that as an adjunct, I’d be let go if I missed work. Through pantomime and whiteboards, my students and I got through the grueling term while I healed. Every month for a year, my husband drove me two hours north so the surgeon could examine my tongue. Every checkup ripped a scab off my memory, catapulting me back into trauma. I stopped running marathons because of chronic pain, though I could still manage 13.1 mile races with a multi-Advil chaser.
Then, last year, my doctor ordered a genetic test. My mother and grandmother had passed away from reproductive cancers, and she wanted to ensure I didn’t have the dreaded BRCA mutation. I didn’t. Instead, I received a thick packet with a shocking red band of color across the first page. Enormous black letters read: “GENETIC MUTATION.”
“It’s responsible for increased risk of melanoma and pancreatic cancer,” the genetic counselor told me over the phone, “and for head and neck cancers.”
Suddenly, I felt liberated, absolved from self-blame. The tumor had not been my fault. Little by little, the absurdity of possessing a flawed body began to replace my shame. I pictured Thor brandishing his hammer, my dentist and doctor and gastroenterologist standing alongside him — a human fortress armed with mouth mirrors and stethoscopes and MRI machines.
For the rest of my life, I’ll go for yearly abdominal imaging and skin checks and biannual trips to the dentist. Though doctor visits still traumatize me, I walk into each full of gratitude and resolved to leave medical professionals more cheerful than I found them. I offer fun facts during each examination. “The tongue is the one muscle that doesn’t need our skeleton to move!” I tell my dentist. “Men have longer tongues than women. A blue whale’s tongue weighs as much as a single giraffe.”
On one recent visit, I described my friend’s gift of Katzenzungen. You can buy them in Germany and Austria, I say, in Brazil, and in Chile where the treat is labeled lenguitas de gato. They’re available on Amazon in white or milk chocolate or marbled.
“That’s . . . odd,” says the dental hygienist, wrinkling her nose in disgust.
“But they’re delicious,” I tell her. Katzenzungen snap pleasingly between the front teeth, the chocolate rich and smooth on the tongue. I ate them all — reserving one for my friend — in two days.
The candy box now holds a position of honor on my writing desk. Now, the five kittens seem more curious than disapproving, their blue eyes and fuzzy ears alert as if listening for the radio music’s next distortion. They’re my cue to remember — the next time the spirit cold-cocks me with its inevitable absurdity — to meet the challenge with a little more sweetness, a little more grace.
Melissa Hart is the author, most recently, of Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Acceptance in Tweens and Teens. www.melissahart.com
