This is a story that I heard my sisters talking about when I
was a kid, back around 2000 when this “event” happened. According to the tale,
a woman working at a post office cut her tongue on an envelope and complained
of swelling and pain in her mouth a few days later. When she went to the
doctor, they were both horrified to find cockroach larvae growing in her gum
line, embedded in her salivary glands. The original message from 2000 is as
follows:
If you lick your envelopes…You won’t
anymore!
This lady was working in a post
office in California, one day she licked the envelopes and postage stamps
instead of using a sponge.
That very day the lady cut her
tongue on an envelope. A week later, she noticed an abnormal swelling of her
tongue. She went to the doctor, and they found nothing wrong. Her tongue was
not sore or anything. A couple of days later, her tongue started to swell more,
and it began to get really sore, so sore, that she could not eat. She went back
to the hospital, and demanded something be done. The doctor, took an x-ray of
her tongue, and noticed a lump. He prepared her for minor surgery.
When the doctor cut her tongue
open, a live roach crawled out. There were roach eggs on the seal of the
envelope. The egg was able to hatch inside of her tongue, because of her
saliva. It was warm and moist…
This is a true story…Pass it on
The original version of the story involves a girl eating
Taco Bell. It is very similar, but slightly different, and goes as follows:
You’ll never eat fast food again!
This girl was really in a hurry one
day so she just stopped off at a Taco Bell and got a Chicken soft taco and ate
it on the way home. Well that night she noticed her jaw was kind of tight and
swollen. The next day it was a little worse so she went to her doctor. He said
she was just have an allergic reaction to something and gave her some cream to
rub on her jaw to help.
After a couple days the swelling
had just gotten worse and she could hardly move her jaw. She went back to the doctor
to see what was wrong. Her doctor had no idea so he started to run some test.
They scrubbed out the inside of her mouth to get tissue samples and they also
took some saliva samples. Well they found out what was wrong.
Apparently her chicken soft taco
had a pregnant roach in it that she ate!!!! The eggs then somehow got into her
saliva glands and she was incubating them in her mouth. They had to remove a
couple of layers in her inner mouth to get all the eggs out. If they hadn’t figured
out what was going on the eggs would have hatched inside the lining of her
mouth!
She’s suing Taco Bell! Of course.
There are several questions that come into play when dealing
with this internet urban legend. First off, can roach eggs be laid in a human’s
mouth without them noticing what was happening? Can eggs really survive inside
someone’s mouth? Where is the credibility? How does the “host” know where the
eggs came from? Can cockroach eggs fit inside a salivary gland?
Before I pick this rumor apart, question by question, I
would like to mention the fact that the entire original message (in both forms)
seemed to be written by a fourth grader. There are grammar, spelling, and punctuation
mistakes all across the board in each message. This truly subtracts from the
credibility of the message. I mean, how are we supposed to trust somebody who
cannot even spell “tests” correctly?
To begin the “busting” of this urban legend, as the
Discovery Channel might call it, let’s look at the anatomy of a pregnant roach.
The ootheca is an egg sac about the size of a dried bean attached to the rump
of mama cockroach. An adult cockroach is on average an inch-and-a-half to two
inches long. A woman would have to be pretty hungry in order to shove an entire
cockroach hidden in a large bite of food into her mouth. She would also have to
be the unluckiest person in the world for that cockroach to move around
unnoticed, dodging teeth and laying eggs in a split second before being torn
apart by her molars.
Aside from the improbability of the roach surviving inside a
human’s mouth long enough to lay eggs, it doesn’t make sense that the egg sac
would even fit into any crevice of this woman’s mouth unless she was on hallucinatory
drugs of some sort or is completely
inexistent altogether. The ootheca is as large as a bean, and fitting it into a
salivary gland would be found to be quite impossible. Thinking that one could
fit into a paper cut on someone’s tongue is just as farfetched.
In the case of the Taco Bell Roach, it is impossible to tell
whether or not the roach came from Taco Bell to begin with. Unless this woman
was starved of food for several days prior and this was her only food, or if
she had kept some of the remnants of the food to prove the existence of a
cockroach, it cannot be claimed that the apparent roach was from Taco bell.
Later on in the circulation of the Cockroach Envelope email,
somebody tried to tag on some credibility at the end of the message:
This is a true story reported on
CNN.
Andy Hume wrote: Hey, I used to
work in an envelope factory. You wouldn’t believe the things that float around
in those gum applicator trays. I haven’t licked an envelope for years.
This is a true story…Pass it on
A little research and it is reported that Andy Hume is a
false name. The only Andy Hume’s known are a reporter for The Ottawa Citizen (not CNN) and a British sports star. A Sandy
Hume was a reporter in Washington who killed himself in 1998. These people,
however are in no way linked to this email and have nothing to do with the
creation of this urban legend.
Altogether, the story does not seem to hold water. But just
to be safe, I don’t lick envelopes anymore.
The full snopes.com article can be found at the following address:
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