Charles Runels, MD

The Story of a Mouth #1:  Young Child Bites Electrical Cord

A three-year-old girl, while playing in the floor of her home, becoming curious, bit into an electrical cord.  You may ask why?  Before you answer, consider that if I asked you right now to try to imagine what an electrical cord tastes like, you could do it.  The shocking fact is that you can imagine what almost anything tastes like because at some time in your life you have had almost everything in your mouth.

So, I'm not going to judge her; I'm just going to be grateful that whenever it was as a child that I put an electrical cord in my mouth, I didn't bite hard enough to sustain a burn.  What is even more interesting is that you can remember the taste of things without really remembering when you tasted it.  To test that theory, can you remember the taste of grass?  Dirt?  Burlap?  Tree bark?  A shoe?  Plastic?  Carpet?

Sorry, got off track a little, back to the story.  The point is that we put many different things in our mouth. This unfortunate girl sustained a severe burn to the bottom lip leaving scar tissue and no lip where there was once a beautiful mouth.  Reconstructive surgery built her a lip but the cosmetic result was not what she wanted.  As a woman, she would sometimes look at photos of herself as a young child and wonder what it would be like to have that cute bow mouth back again.   

Don't, misunderstand me.  This woman walked into my office with a heart as sweet as her bow mouth would imply.  This was not a young mother spending grocery money for vanity.  This was a sweet mother who wanted to reward her labors by gifting herself with a correction of her childhood scars.