Tongue-Sucking and Me

An old habit is haunting me. 

When I was a child, I didn't suck my thumb--I sucked my tongue.  This was partly because I didn't want to stick my thumb into my mouth (yuck!) and partly because I have a long tongue (yeah, yeah, I'm wasted on a man, move along).  To keep it in my mouth when I was little, I folded it half, so the tip of my tongue faced the back of my mouth.  Once you've done this, the natural progression is to suck on it. 

This bugged my mother.  There was no way for her to break me of the habit.  You can pull a child's thumb out of his mouth.  You can take pacifiers away.  But you can't take a kid's tongue away.  Not without incurring some serious prison time, at any rate.

It took me a long, long time to outgrow this habit.  I was probably in my teens before I finally gave it up.

Now it's back.  And in a weird way.

The kidney stones have me on Norco a lot to relieve pain.  They also make me a little high.  And they make me suck my tongue.  It's strange, but true.  About twenty minutes after I pop a Norco, I find myself sucking my tongue.  I don't even notice until I've been doing it for a while.  Sometimes I notice only because my jaw has become tense from all the motion.

I don't understand the mechanism here.  Maybe the Norco produces a neurological side effect.  Or maybe Norco re-creates in my head how it felt to suck my tongue when I was little, which makes me subconsciously go back to it.  Or maybe it's unrelated and the trauma of the last two and a half months makes me look to an earlier time for comfort.

Whatever it is, it's weird.

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