Bite Your Tongue

When I was seven years old, I nearly bit off part of my tongue. Since this is not a terribly common experience, allow me to set the scene (don’t worry, I won’t get too descriptive):

There is a little girl sitting in the back of her mother’s car. They are driving home from a dentist appointment. It was a cavity filling, her first one, and it’s the first time she has been given Novocain. Being naturally anxious, the little girl has many tics that she does to try to keep herself comfortable. One of these is biting her tongue. Unfortunately, with the Novocain, she can’t feel when she’s biting down too hard. 

The boy next to her – a kid who her mother often babysits – says “Miss Jen, Jordyn’s mouth is bleeding.” Initially, her mother brushes it off, but the boy informs her “It’s bleeding a lot.” So she has the little girl open her mouth and looks in the rear view mirror to examine the damage. There is a rough slice through part of her tongue. When they get home, she jams a rag in her daughter’s mouth, wrapping it around her tongue to preserve it from further bites, and tells her to keep it there until she can feel her mouth again. All that time, I didn't quite understand what had happened, that is, until my mother explained it to me.

This experience left me mostly unscathed. The tongue, fortunately, is one of the parts of the body that heals the fastest, and a little less than a week later, it was as good as new. However, my mouth has become much more sensitive. Not in a physical sense, but in a psychological one. Mouth pain makes my pulse accelerate, makes my chest get tight, and my stomach turn. Accidentally biting my tongue while eating makes me lose my appetite. If there is even the slightest threat of mouth-trauma in a horror movie, I close my eyes for the rest of the scene. After getting dental work done, I will periodically open my mouth and drag my index finger across my tongue to check for blood. 

I find this response particularly interesting because, even once sensation came back into my mouth, I never really felt any pain. There was a bit of a dull ache where I had bitten myself, but nothing thought-consuming, nothing sharp – perhaps gnawing or biting would be expected, but those aren’t the words I would use either. My current reaction to the memory of the pain is more severe than I remember the pain itself being.

Despite my experience being excluded because I was numbed by medication, I am reminded of Glucklich's description of sufferers failing to experience pain in the moment of severe injury because "it is masked or blotted out by the preoccupation with, or awareness of, other matters. Hours after the injury, the soldier or athlete may suddenly become aware of the injury, or rather of a pain that can be so intense as to require powerful sedation" (402).

Though I remember no pain, I do remember a younger me staring in the mirror, utterly mesmerized by my cut tongue. Sometimes, I would try to touch it, but my mother cautioned me of the pain that would surely follow if I dared. As such, my association with pain is not grounded in the minimal pain of the actual experience, but in the threat of potential severe pain.