This is exactly what I did this past Friday night. I bit my damn tongue so hard I bled for 20 minutes. Then my tongue swelled up to the point where I was speaking a-la Mike Tyson. Or more like Bill Cosby doing his routine of what you sound like when you’re on Novocain at the dentist (“I-be-O-bee Kay-Bee”). It was a good thing it was after dinner, or I wouldn’t have been able to eat.
Over the next couple of days (that still continues on even today thank you very much) this little unintentional, yet self inflicted, tongue injury has brought up the idea of tongue rings. Don’t misunderstand, I am all for body piercings. At one time or another I have had three holes in one ear, two in the other and one belly ring. I only use one set of my earring holes now at any given time and I wouldn’t give up my belly ring for anything. I even griped about having to take it out when I had my appendix out last April. I would even consider a tiny nose piercing if I wasn’t in the military. But it’s things like biting one’s tongue that makes me wonder, even more than normal, how anyone in their right mind would pierce a metal rod through the center of their tongue. On purpose.
The pain I felt after biting my tongue was enough for me to be unwilling to speak at all for a good 5-7 minutes. Mostly because I was trying not to encourage even MORE bleeding. Granted, I took a good sized chunk of tongue from the side, rather than straight through the middle, but I am not seeing the difference in pain level based solely on location of said hole. I have talked to people who have had tongue rings and I get a bunch of different answers when I ask the question “Didn’t that HURT??” But the majority of people answered that no, it didn’t hurt. I heard the same thing about the belly rings too. I don’t know where those people got their navel’s pierced, but I got mine done in South Florida and it hurt like hell. Way more than I thought it would. I remember as he was doing it thinking to myself, ‘So this is what it feels like to be a worm being threaded onto a bait hook’.
Was I just being a wimp? Are the people I talked to all lying or trying to make people think that THEY have a high pain tolerance? I suppose, it’s possible, but I think I have a pretty good pain threshold myself. Had me a kidney stone and survived (although I pretty much swore to Gods I don’t even believe in that I would never pee again as long as I lived). I went three full days with appendix pain before finally being ordered to see a doctor. Thought I could probably have gone longer too, but an order was an order and the Colonel was bigger than me. But biting my tongue on Friday was pretty high ranking in the Great Pain’s department. It’s still swollen and painful enough 3 days later for me to have reduced my eating by about 50- 60% and what I do eat is very slow in the chewing department.
So really…why would ANYONE injure their tongue on purpose??? Suffice it to say that my opinion about tongue rings has not improved.
The Sister
No comments:
Post a Comment