On Constant Craving: Hypoglossus

No, I’d never heard of it either. Sounds like a lipstick brand, a low gloss version for the retiring type. Of which I am not!

Apologies in advance for the scientific image. Let’s be honest, you wouldn’t have been very happy with an image of my tongue. The hypoglossus muscle (from Greek: hypo – under, and glossa – tongue) enables the tongue’s movement. It supports speech and swallowing, and moves substances around the mouth.

The red bit is the hypoglossus

The hypoglossal nerve (CNXII) is the tongue’s motor; it gives the tongue its energy and action. When the nerve is damaged, it affects your capacity to articulate words, causing slurring and sluggish speech, can trigger choking, and makes the process of manipulating food around your mouth, like steak, really fucking hard. Food that once had a face, and is generally red and muscular and striated, has become a thing of terror!

On that note, while tucking into some pumpkin soup two years ago, my daughter Pia said to me ‘Mum, what’s going on with your speech?’. In true motherly fashion, I shrugged, and flew to Italy. The rest is history. I’m still awaiting a diagnosis. The more I ask Doctor Google about hypo things of the mouth and tongue, the deeper I dive into the rabbit hole and the more anxious I become. But I’ve become a research whiz, and have a mountain of manila folders containing research papers from China to Turkey to the USA. Although MRIs have ruled out my having a stroke, in China, when a stroke patient suffers dysarthria (weakness of the tongue) they are immediately subject to acupuncture of the tongue. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so I gave it a go, every day for weeks, based solely on the research and a wee bit of practitioner coercion. Success rate, zero.

So I wait. And get on with life. I’ve become an older woman who spends hours thinking about her health, and an inordinate amount of time sitting in medical waiting rooms, playing solitaire on my device. The narrow road to the deep south of the 21^st century’s broken medical system, where specialists and receptionists triage the acute over the chronic - rightly so - life is akin to sitting at the shelter outside a nursing home waiting for the bus.

A woman’s tongue is one of her crucial muscles, and assets. It enables her to have a voice in a man’s world. Assists her to speak truth to power, have agency, and poke it out in defiance. The applications of the tongue are astonishing. Of the 7 trillion nerves in the human body, it takes less than a handful of them to take leave of their senses and for all hell to break loose.

In the meantime, and in my current and enduring position as house-sitter extraordinaire, wiling away the hours in social and intellectual exchange has fallen by the wayside and been substituted with tongue licking and tail wagging. I've never owned a dog in my life. Dogs are all bounce, eyes and dynamism. I’ve become adept at reading their body language, while sitting on the fence or in the garden or on the couch gazing into the beyond, paw to hand, contemplating this one mysterious life. Dogs aren't interested in my health or my words, only my companionship. It’s soul-saving.

Here’s a small selection of my charges. Thank you to them all.

Huxley