O for a Tongue to Sing

When Barbara “Kip” Hoosier sings, she has the voice of an angel. Beautiful, moving, anointed. When she speaks her words are crisp, clear, and articulate. This isn’t a particularly surprising or unique talent — except that Hoosier does them after losing part of her tongue to cancer.

She isn’t supposed to be able to sing — or even speak — at all.

In the mid 2000s, Hoosier, of Camp Point, Illinois, noticed a white spot on her tongue. After she asked her dentist about it he removed it. Following a biopsy, the dentist assured her that she had nothing to worry about. But the spot reappeared, and continued to grow.

Finally in 2013, when her youngest grandson, Corbyn, pointed the spot out, Hoosier decided to have it rechecked. That decision led her to multiple physicians, and finally a diagnosis of a rare form of cancer. But doctors could provide no advice beyond urging Hoosier to rinse with a mouthwash.

“I couldn’t believe that was the treatment,” Hoosier says. “You don’t take care of cancer with mouthwash!”

So she searched for another oncologist who would invest energies toward helping her battle her diagnosis. She found Dr. Jason Rich, who took a look at her mouth and recommended immediate treatment, lest Hoosier lose her tongue.

The news devastated Hoosier, whose greatest joy had been using her tongue to sing God’s praises. Singing in church formed her earliest memories. Yet she faced the possibility of losing that gift to cancer.

“I really had to trust that God had a plan,” she says. “I didn’t know what it was, but I chose to believe that He was going to handle it.”

Two weeks later, in November 2013, Hoosier underwent an intense three-and-a-half hour surgery.

“They cut my tongue all the way from the back to the front,” she says. A quarter of an inch of cancer cells were removed from the center. However, Rich faced a worst-case scenario. As he began to remove the tumor, he saw that it had spread so much that he needed to keep cutting and removing. But as he did, he finally realized he must either extract the entire tongue or close it up. Rich opted to end the surgery, allowing Hoosier to keep the rest of her tongue, but also left her with active cancer cells and a scary prognosis: she might never sing or speak again.

“I know the Lord gave me a voice to use for Him, and I wasn’t going to give in to what the enemy tried to take from me,” Hoosier says. It took several weeks for the swelling to go down and for her tongue to heal from the surgery, but as soon as she could, she forced her tongue to begin the long process of articulating words.

“My tongue feels constantly like it’s scalded, so that presented a challenge as well,” she admits. “But I just kept at it and figured out how to position my mouth or tongue in a different way to get the results I wanted.” After seven grueling weeks, she could finally say words. Singing returned eight months later, in July 2014.

The praise songs that she had always shared at the church she attends, Faith Assembly in Quincy, Illinois, as well as in concerts throughout the region began to have a miraculous testimony to go with them. Later that year she received another blessing when she won Female Vocalist of the Year from the Country Gospel Music Association.  

“Kip’s voice has always had a special anointing, but now she brings an even greater passion to singing,” says Randy Green, associate pastor of Faith Assembly. “Her ministry comes from a much deeper place of seeing God’s faithfulness at work in her life. Her voice truly is a gift now, because it could have been gone.”

Though this particular type of cancer has no other treatment except for removal, Hoosier and her doctor keep an eye on the tumors. She refuses to worry as she continues to lift her voice to the heavens, with a strong faith believing that God is still at work.

“That,” she says, “is definitely something to sing about!”

Ginger Kolbaba

Ginger Kolbaba ( www.gingerkolbaba.com) is a speaker and author who lives in the Chicago area. She is the author of Your Best Happily Ever After and co-author of Breakthrough: The Miraculous True Story of a Mother's Faith and Her Child's Resurrection.