Flagpoles Are Serious Business

I can't recall if I've blogged about the infamous flagpole incident, so I'm gonna do that right about now.

We've all seen A Christmas Story when the whimpy little boy gets dared to stick his tongue to a flagpole and the fire department has to come and Ralphie feels terrible about it for all of two minutes. For whatever reason, a lot of people still don't believe that sticking one's tongue to a very cold flagpole will result in one's tongue becoming frozen to said flagpole.

Alas, if only I were not such a skeptic and a researcher by nature, I might have been spared the agony and the shame of being that girl. You know, that girl, the one that no one wants to be.

So it was a dark and VERY cold January evening in Connecticut and we were driving around, looking for trouble. This all took place last year over winter break.

All of a sudden I got it in my head that it would be a fabulous idea to put the old flagpole myth to the test. Brilliant.

So we drove to our old elementary school, hopped out of our cars, and prepared ourselves for laughs. Not believing that it would work, I stuck my tongue to the icy flagpole with no fear. When I tried to pull away, I felt the tug of the icy metal at my tongue and my lower lip which had also become frozen to the pole. Tears began to stream down my face and I begged my friends to do something. They ran for water, which would do nothing in the below freezing temperatures. We were not close enough to run home for help, and I was in too much panic to be left alone. Finally, I braced myself, put all my muscle against the pole and ripped my tongue off the flagpole. My friends looked away with terror and I wrapped my arms around my head in excruciating pain and walked blindly back to my car.

I rested my head on my car as my heart started to calm down and stop racing wildly and my vision began to go back to normal. I didn't care about anything in the world except that my tongue was no longer an extension of the flagpole (I'm a psychology major, not a chemistry major, I had no idea that when you stick your tongue to a frozen flagpole that there is a chemical reaction). My best friend Kate came up to me and asked me if I was alright. I looked over at her and opened my mouth to speak, but when I did that no words came, only blood splattered out of my mouth. I spat into the snow and tried not to look because I can't handle the sight of blood at all. I decided we needed to get out of there, and we needed to figure out how to take care of it without involving my mother. We drove home in silence. I was driving, with the window rolled all the way down and my head sticking as far out of the window as possible so that the blood dripping from my mouth wouldn't get on my car or my clothes.

So we got back to my house and we rushed past my mother and into the basement. I think Kate went and got hot water or something while I sat and tried to keep talking to my friends. I kept saying things like "It'll be fine I think" "It's totally fine" but eventually I couldn't speak anymore because my tongue had swollen to at least 2 times its normal size. I couldn't even breathe out of my mouth.

I told my sister, who told me I was stupid, who then told my mother that I was stupid (I had told her by then, and begun rinsing my mouth with salt water), but my mother in her infinite kindness does not believe I am stupid, just that I am strange and too curious for my own good.

I couldn't eat solid food or speak (and be understood) for two weeks. I still have two scars on my tongue, and I have no feeling on the tip of my tongue, and that will likely be the way it will be for the rest of my life (since it has been almost exactly a year now since that fateful evening).

So the moral of the story is: Tongues really can get stuck fast to flagpoles, and it sucks, so don't do it!

P.S. Molly I hope you think this is accurate. I'm glad you and Natasha and Kate were there, even if none of you tried to stop me :-P