Over a cup of coffee, Tiara Herr rolls up her sleeves to reveal two tattoos. One features five flowers representing the number of times cancer nearly killed her. The other tattoo – 14188 – is her hospital patient number.

Given what she’s experienced in life – “I have lived with a dark cloud” — it would be natural to expect that Herr would be most at ease in the shadows. Instead, she loves being on center stage in front of an audience.

To describe what she does with her artistic gift diminishes what she has accomplished, ignoring the obstacles. To focus only on her struggles, though, diminishes what Herr shares with audiences and fellow performers.

Is Herr a good singer and vocal coach? Or is she a good singer and vocal coach for someone who has experienced profound hearing loss?

“I’ve come to realize that damn near everyone I meet seems to believe that the ability to sing or play music well is a quality that simply cannot be possessed by individuals who are hard-of-hearing or deaf,” said Herr, who was drawn to the theater and performing while a student at Banks High School.

“When I was in my 20s,” she said, “a director told me no one would ever hire me because the audience would be unable to understand what I was saying because of what he called my deaf accent.”

Herr, 30, grew up in Timber, a small town in unincorporated Washington County. After graduating from high school, she went to Pacific University in Forest Grove, where she earned bachelor’s degrees in music and biology.

Now, she is a research assistant at The Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute, part of Oregon Health & Science University. Herr works with a team in Beaverton studying viral disease threats using multiple lasers to analyze and characterize the immunological make-up of every cell in a sample stained with fluorescent antibodies.

She also plays piano, sings, acts, directs and serves as a vocal coach with Theatre in the Grove, a community theater in Forest Grove.

When Tiara was a high school junior, her older sister, Trinity, learned the theater was holding auditions for a musical. The sisters, a cousin and friends all tried out and were cast.

“Tiara can hear musical things I don’t hear that need fixing,” said Ken Centers, who has called on Herr as a vocal director for past productions he’s directed. “But then, when we’re talking, there are moments when she says she can’t hear me.”

Herr reads lips and occasionally uses hearing aids but has not found a pair that helps with her form of hearing loss. She does not use them when she sings, acts or works with other singers.

Herr is currently involved in the Dec. 2-18 production of “World War II Radio Christmas” by Portland playwright Pat Kruis Tellinghusen. The play is set in 1940s Portland and features songs and stories inspired by the experiences of real veterans. Herr is not only in the cast of three women, five men and three children, but she also wrote the music for the commercial jingles used in the production.

Herr said she learned how to sing by focusing on how her tongue felt in her mouth rather than by hearing and repeating notes and phrases.

“I don’t really understand it,” said Centers. “The best thing I can say is that she’s an enigma.”

***

Part of the mystery is why Herr is even alive. When she was 13 months old, surgeons removed a cancerous tumor from the adrenal gland on top of a kidney. Months later, Herr’s mother felt more lumps. Herr returned to the Portland hospital. Surgeons removed the cancerous tumors, and the girl was given a good prognosis, her mother said.

“When she was 3, she started complaining,” said her mother, Donna Herr. “She said her fishbones hurt, and she pointed to her ribs.”

Another trip to the hospital revealed a large cancerous tumor had attached to her liver, displacing the little girl’s pancreas and spleen. The tumor was removed. The doctor suspected more cancerous nodules on her leg and told Herr’s mother the child had high-risk neuroblastoma, a cancer that develops throughout the body in nerve cells.

“We were told she had a 20% chance of survival,” said Donna Herr. “We called St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis because they specialize in childhood cancer.”

The Herrs were told they’d have to pay their way to St. Jude’s. If, after an exam, Tiara was accepted as a patient, the hospital would pick up all future medical and travel costs. They didn’t have the money to make the initial trip. St. Jude’s officials eventually called Donna Herr to say that parents of a St. Jude’s child who had died of neuroblastoma learned of Tiara’s situation and offered to pay for airline tickets and lodging to bring the Oregon girl to the hospital.

“I truly believe there was a higher power at work,” said Donna Herr. “When we got there, they did all their tests and found Tiara had a tumor at the bottom of her spine. We were told that when she started treatment, she was going to lose some or all her hearing because of the extensive and intensive chemotherapy.”

Donna Herr said drugs needed to fight that form of cancer destroyed her daughter’s inner eardrums, causing her to lose nearly all her hearing within six months.

For the next eight years, Tiara Herr traveled to St. Jude’s for treatments. By the end of the journey, surgeons had removed 40 tumors. She underwent a bone marrow transplant, multiple rounds of chemotherapy and intense radiation treatments. Though she could no longer hear the way she had in the past, she never lost her love of music.

“While I was sick with cancer and going through a plethora of treatments, my mother and father would encourage me to sing to help me get through,” she said. “This led to me singing at the top of my little lungs while skipping through the hospital in my frilly Easter dresses when I was feeling better. I truly believe that my family fostered a talent I was born with and never let me think for one second that I couldn’t sing just because I was hard of hearing.”

***

Tiara Herr learned to love music from her father, George Andrew Herr, who died in 2012 from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

“He sang each morning,” she said. “That’s how he woke us up. He was a lovely tenor. On the way to school, we listened to music in the car, and he sang along with Barry Manilow.”

Despite her hearing loss, Tiara taught her herself how to play the family piano and sing. Herr said she hears what she calls “the shape” of a sound. Because she had perfect hearing until she was 6, she said she can remember chords, notes and musical phrases.

“I have profound bilateral hearing loss referred to as sensorineural hearing loss,” said Herr. “I can hear almost normal at low pitches, but as the frequency increases, my ability to hear drops off to literally nothing. I am about 90% deaf. I cannot hear fire alarms or birds singing, the latter of which makes me incredibly sad as people say the singing of birds is so beautiful.”

In college, Herr studied voice and piano, was in a choir and joined singers from Pacific University who performed in Taiwan.

“I think I was born into a family that always had music playing and were singing to me,” said Herr. “But part of it has always been this mysterious thing. Once I lost the biggest section of my hearing, it’s like my other senses magically found a way to make it possible for me to sing and play along with everyone else.”

When pressed to explain “mystery,” Herr turns to music theory and history.

“I can even recognize pitches that I can’t hear by feeling the vibration and transposing it down to an octave I can hear in my head,” she said. “I got the idea from Beethoven, actually. As he lost his hearing, he started to lay his head on the piano to be able to identify and ‘hear’ his compositions using his sense of touch, sight, and musical intuition. This is basically what I do.”

Herr brings that experience and background to Theatre in the Grove.

“She’s an inspiration to everyone she works with,” said Jennifer Grimes, who performs in Theatre in the Grove productions, including last summer’s “Mamma Mia.” “She does it with grace and optimism and confidence you wouldn’t expect if you knew her story.”

Grimes said watching Herr work as vocal director of “Mamma Mia” was “phenomenal.”

“There were 40 of us, and she could tell who was singing the right notes, who needed work,” said Grimes. “She worked out all the harmonies. I don’t know how she does it.”

Earlier this year, Herr returned to St. Jude’s to participate in a study on the long-term effects of cancer and treatment on children. She took her hearing aids to help researchers evaluate her.

“I played the grand piano in the cafeteria every single day,” she said. “I was surprised how many children noticed that I was wearing the same hearing aids and hospital bracelet as them and were shocked that I could sing and play. I really hope that I can be a role model for children everywhere and let them know that they not only can beat their cancer, but also grow up to be a musician even if they wear hearing aids.”

Herr does not believe that music must be reduced to notes and chords written on a page.

“Music is so much more than sound,” she said. “Music is emotion. Music is intuitive. Music is natural. Everything is musical and resides in the souls of us all.”

— Tom Hallman Jr. 503-221-8224; thallman@oregonian.com; @thallmanjr

This article is supported by PacificSource, a partner of Here is Oregon. The journalism is produced independently by members of The Oregonian/OregonLive newsroom.