Life before 2020 was normal for Tanja Bage, a fit and active working mother-of-two. But it was not a global pandemic that changed Bage’s life that year \u2013 instead a cancer diagnosis that stole her voice.<\/p>\n
A professional singer and actress, Bage, from Leeds, has spent much of her adult life on the stage performing in theatre productions. Her voice was one of her greatest assets and a huge part of her identity.<\/p>\n
Singing remains her passion, but she now performs without a voice box since hers was removed during treatment.<\/p>\n
Bage had a total laryngectomy, which also repositioned her airway, after being diagnosed with adenoid cystic carcinoma – cancer of the salivary glands – six years ago, when she was 38.<\/p>\n
It came two years after her primary symptom, breathlessness, began. <\/p>\n
Throughout her pregnancy with her second child, Bage noticed herself becoming short of breath and wheezing in a way that was noticeable to those around her.<\/p>\n
She was given chest X-rays and her blood oxygen levels were normal. The breathlessness continued for the next two years as she desperately tried to get answers from doctors.<\/p>\n
By this point, she was struggling to present work to colleagues at Asda and read to her young children, and her voice would be hoarse by the end of each day.<\/p>\n
“By January 2020, I knew it wasn’t normal, but doctors still hadn’t worked out what it was, and I didn’t think it was cancer. <\/p>\n
“I remember seeing my GP and he did all the usual observations. He said my blood pressure was fine, my chest sounded clear\u2026but that time he said: ‘I’m going to listen to your neck’. He said he thought I had an upper airway obstruction”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Life before 2020 was normal for Tanja Bage, a fit and active working mother-of-two. But it was not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":775677,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-775676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/775677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}