Culver City, California -- "Top Chef" alum Shirley Chung has gone public with her cancer diagnosis.
Sharing avideoon social media in which her hair is getting shaved, Chung wrote that she had some “personal news.”
“Since last year December, I had a series of dental issues, I bit my tongue severely; I fractured my tooth and had to extract it and get an implant… we thought it was because I am a heavy teeth grinder,” she wrote.
The “Top Chef” Season 11 finalist and Season 14 competitor said she was initially “too busy to see a EMT specialist” but later developed ulcers in her mouth and “a hidden tumor” under her tongue.
“A few days later, I was diagnosed, stage 4 tongue cancer, as cancer cells also spread into my lymph nodes,” Chung, 47, wrote. “I was very calm when doctors delivered the news, as a chef, I’ve always thrive under pressure.”
Her treatment options, she wrote, were surgical removal of her tongue or treatment similar to a “unicorn case” of another chef who received radiation and chemotherapy at the University of Chicago.
While it meant relocating for treatment, Chung said she decided to try it.
“Higher survival rate, or keep my tongue?” she wrote. “I chose to keep my tongue, I am a fighter, I am a chef, I can be that unicorn too.”
Chung said she’s already completed six weeks of chemo with more to go. She ended her post on a hopeful note.
“Your love and support will carry me through,” she wrote. “Cheer me on, Shirley Chung 2.0 will be reborn in 2025!”
According to theAmerican Cancer Society, more than 58,000 new cases of oral cavity and oropharyngeal cancers are diagnosed in the United States each year. About 20% of the cases occur in people younger than 55.
Oropharyngeal cancer is a type of head and neck cancer that accounts for about 18,000 newly diagnosed cases in the U.S. every year.
The leading cause of head and neck cancers is smoking tobacco, and as smoking has become less common in recent years, so has the occurrence for most head and neck cancers. The exception to this is oropharyngeal cancer, which is drastically increasing, especially in the younger population. The cause of this steady rise is human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, a common sexually transmitted disease and a leading risk factor for oropharyngeal cancer.
About 70% of all oropharyngeal cancers in the U.S. are caused by HPV. Tobacco and alcohol are still important factors for developing oropharyngeal cancers, but doctors now distinguish between HPV-related oropharyngeal cancers and HPV-negative oropharyngeal cancers. The good news is, HPV-related oropharyngeal cancers tend to be much more responsive to treatment.
“Cure rates are high for HPV-driven oropharynx cancer, particularly when the tumors are small and occur in non-smokers,” says Barbara Burtness, MD, a Yale Medicine medical oncologist. “In fact, treatments developed in an era of predominantly tobacco-initiated cancers may be more intensive than is necessary for patients with HPV-driven cancers.”
Acclaimed chef Grant Achatz spoke withNPR in a 2011interview about his own experience with stage 4 tongue cancer and undergoing treatment at the University of Chicago.
Though it is not known if he is the patient Chung referred to as a “unicorn case” in her post,Achatz’scancer went into remission and he eventually regained his sense of taste.
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