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First Human Tongue Transplant
JThaddeus writes "The New Scientist reports that "The world's first human tongue transplant has been successfully carried out by doctors in Austria." The 14-hour surgery replaced the 42-year old owner's original tongue which had to be removed because of a malignant tumour in his mouth. (Imagine the interviews: "I wanna thank all the doctorth and nurtheth who performed thith thuccethful thurgery.")"
First successful tongue transplant? I'm curious then, does food taste different because it was somebody else's tongue? Oh yeah, FP! =)
This sig no verb.
I've been transplanting my tongue into other people's mouths for years.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
!tiodi uoy sdrawkcab eugnot eht dehcatta uoY
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
A good friend had cancer in his tongue a few years back. Rather than transplant in a donor, they just pulled up some of his pectoral and rebuilt it into a tongue for him. He could eat and drink, but lacked all sense of taste (as does the transplant patient, btw)
He had a helluva time with Tic Tacs, since he also couldn't feel tiny things.
Do me a favor, don't mod this posting. If you must, at least do a "+1 - Funny" as he would have wanted it that way.
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"(Imagine the interviews: "I wanna thank all the doctorth and nurtheth who performed thith thuccethful thurgery.)"
Anybody else read this and think that the story submitter picked a bad time to make a joke? The dude had cancer, it's not like he lost his tongue in a way that'd earn him a Darwin Award Honorable Mention. Making fun of him for that was tasteless, no pun intended.
"Derp de derp."
I just got the first "Increase your tounge by 6 inches!" spam in by mailbox.
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So, aside from the fact (presuming this was a xenotransplant) that this guy is going to have to take immunosuppresants for the rest of his life which have significant side effects like kidney damage, it will be interesting to see what happens. The tongue is actually a pretty impressive bit of tissue comprised of several layers of muscle, and the innervation of it from the hypoglossal CN is not insignificant.
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Tongue Cancer is just a barrel of laughs!
If this works it'll be great. But unfortunately, it will be like most transplants - temporary. Something like ~75%, or more, of transplants are rejected after 5-7 years, even when the person is taking immunosuppresive drugs. Fact of the matter is, we understand why rejection occurs, but we don't yet have the ability to prevent it. Until that happens, and xenotransplantation will play a big role in it, transplants will continue to be risky and long-term failures. But hey, sometimes that is better than the alternative...
Does this change the way the transplant patient tastes certain foods? Will he like foods he didn't like before or dislike foods he used to like? Perhaps his favorite food will be whatever the person that had the tongue before liked? Just wondering.
I would like to clarify this for you slightly. The moral of that post was to show how unfunny tongue cancer really is. Considering the wisecrack in the story, this bring-us-down-to-reality post shows a lot of insight on the part of the poster.
I hope you, as well as JThaddeus, take some time to give this a bit of reflection.
Dear submitters, do you think we could possibly get story writeups without the bad 12-yearold humor? You know, something befitting a site visited by tens of thousands every day, and not the "hey bevis, huh, his tongue has cancer" drivel? Mmm'kay, thanks. (and editors, you know you can actually... EDIT those submissions, too.)
I call dibs on Gene Simmons' tongue.
Tongue-fucking girls just got easier!
Apparently without a tongue, he would have had to be tube fed for the rest of his life.
Apparently it was SCO CEO Darl McBride's tongue. They transplanted it from Bill Gates' ass.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak