quote:
Originally posted by Victor
thicker than your thumb??? Are you sure that you are talking about your frenum and not the whole base of your tongue? my understanding is that the frenum is the thin tendom that runds through the center and as such could not be compared to a thumb but more like a pisece of string!
Anyway, my dentist in San Francisco says that he is willing to do it as it is a common procedure that is done to relive "tongue tiedness" or a condition where the frenum is so tight tht it makes it difficult to speak and have normal movements of the tongue. this would just be an elective version of the same procedure in a healthy patient who wanted additional mobility. It is certainly much simpler and less invasive than the many plastic surgery operations that are frequently done for peoples vanity!
Hello Victor,
Oh yes, I'm serious about it being as thick as my thumb at the base. It looks like there is a lot of bio-individuality in this. A lot of it is 'half inside' the tongue in its natural state. It's only with snipping that more of it comes to the surface.
That thumb-sized thing is down to less than a pinkie-finger in size now. When I say thumb-sized though, don't let the description mislead you --- it is not circular in shape, and as I said, most of it is 'inside' the tongue at any time. At this point in fact, pretty much none of it protrudes. And at the base it is squishy and flexible, containing lots of tendon-fibers but not as densely as it used to be in the more stringy area closer to the tip.
My impression is that some of the tendon-fibers in the squishy area at the base (further back inside the tongue) go up somewhere close to the tip which is not exposed at the surface. Anyway, they are certainly 'limiting' fibers for tongue extension, which I know because they become taut and hard when I pull out my tongue. Actually, I take advantage of this in the frenum-snipping technique I am using.
Your frenum may be sufficiently non-limiting that you won't need the whole thing removed. I was aware of that procedure for dealing with tongue-tiedness, but it wouldn't be enough in a case like mine --- I am at the other extreme of this biology --- after the earliest snipping, (when I got a lot of bang-for-my-snip) I have had to do a LOT of snipping to get far. Actually, I am doubly disadvantaged, because apart from having an elaborate and very limiting frenum, I think I also have a very long soft palate -- my tongue can now come out I'd say five or six centimeters from my front teeth and I still can't get it over the soft palate.
Another thing -- I've pretty much snipped away all frenum that is visible on the upper half of my tongue (when I put it 'up') and I've reached a limit there. I have to work on the bottom half to get anywhere now. I do know that Yogani did not have to do this---he was able to work on the top alone in order to get his tongue to any level of freedom that he needed. [It is possible that this condition is the result of the speed at which I have been snipping --- and that if I wait long enough, more fibers will be exposed at the tip. I don't know about this, and I don't need to, since there are still fibers well-exposed at the bottom that I can work on].
And no, I'm not cutting my tongue itself!!
![[:)]](http://www.aypsite.com/plus-forum/Smileys/akyhne/icon_smile.gif "Smile")
That would hurt and bleed like hell and what I am doing does not.
I don't think I'll get significant mobility from here until nearly all of my frenum is gone. (There is a lot remaining and it is all much the same length.) I'm using a different frenum-snipping technique now, one I developed from experimentation, which does not use the cuticle-snipper, and I might be able to be convinced to explain it individually to people if they are interested in it (I call it 'tooled talavya'.) But I'm not going to post it up for general use, (at least not now -- I may convince myself to later) because I think it requires more skill than the cuticle-snipper-based method in order to do it well. This alternative technique though allows for much more significant, and therefore much faster frenum-snipping, and is particularly helpful when the frenum no longer protrudes from the surface of the underside of the tongue, as in my case.
>> It is certainly much simpler and less invasive than the many plastic surgery operations that are frequently done for peoples vanity!
Absolutely. But the law isn't necessarily smart, juries even less smart, and a surgeon who does a common procedure, even if done only for vanity, is on safer legal territory than a surgeon who does a very unusual one, even if it is for a much more profound reason. So I think if an oral surgeon is asked to remove a really big chunk of frenum ( a qualitatively different operation to the less invasive tongue-tiedness one) he or she may balk. But maybe not...
-D
