HOLE IN MY TONGUE

When I was a kid, we had no air conditioning or fans in our house and our windows were always open. We had screens in some of the windows, but not all. I was sitting in an open widow and my brother gave me a little shove--I had my lips to a glass of pop I was drinking--as I fell, the glass broke and cut through my tongue.

What to do? Mother looked at it and since she couldn't put mercurochrome on it--she just stuck some gauze in my mouth--and waited for the bleeding to stop! [Do they still even have mercurochrome? That, along with Ben-Gay, camphorated oil, and Unguentine, is how we survived! No doctors or hospitals for us!]

I was on a liquid diet for several days! I felt like Tom Sawyer as I wanted to charge for people to look at the hole in my tongue!

When I was working at IH I kept losing my voice because I was trying to be heard over the noise level in the plant. After going to a series of doctors, I was referred to an otolaryngologist. The doctor had escaped during the Hungarian Revolution against USSR. As she was examining me she asked, "Are you an epileptic?" I answered that I was not. She told me that it was common for epileptics of my generation to have similar scars on their tongues. She went on to explain to me that they used to have large safety pins that they used to pin the tongue to shirt collars during seizures. OOOOOWWWWWOOOW!