“You’re going to lose two-thirds of your tongue,” the doctor was telling him. “As he was explaining to me that I was going to lose my tongue, I was redrafting a reply in my head.”

“When the doctor told me the news, there was a work email that was bugging me and I still had that on my mind,” Joe wrote to me last summer.

It was rooted deep in the base of Joe’s tongue, mounding upward and out, its tip breaking the surface just where the telltale sore was located. The image revealed a tumour like an iceberg. They’d take an MRI to make sure there wasn’t any serious inward growth, and then schedule the surgery. This tiny sore could likely be nipped out without much damage to the rest of his tongue. The oncologists at Guy’s reassured Joe again: the cancerous spot was small, and cancer of the tongue typically starts on the surface and grows inward. Now Joe was transferred to Guy’s hospital, which has one of the best oral cancer teams in Britain. The second time Joe’s biopsy results came back positive, the specialist was startled. When the biopsy results came back positive for cancerous cells, the specialist said that the lab must have made a mistake. I’m sure it’s nothing, the specialist said, you don’t check any of the boxes, but we’ll do a biopsy, just in case. You’re not a smoker, and you’re 31 years old. But he’d make an appointment, just in case. The cut was nothing, Joe was sure: he was a non-smoker with no family history of cancer. He Googled “cut on tongue won’t heal” and, after sifting through pages of medical information on oral cancer, he decided to call his doctor. He figured he’d bitten himself in his sleep and thought nothing more about it until halfway through the winter holidays, when he realised the sore was still with him. L ast November, Joe Morris, a 31-year-old film-maker from London, noticed a sore spot on his tongue.

Half life text to speech