Insect Urban Legends
A woman was working in a post office in California. One day, instead of using a sponge, she licked the envelopes and postage stamps and accidentally cut her tongue on one of the envelopes. A week later she noticed an abnormal swelling of her tongue. She went to the doctor and they could find nothing wrong. A couple of days later her tongue started to swell even more and it began to get really sore. She returned to the hospital and demanded something be done. The doctor took an x-ray of her tongue and noticed a lump. He decided to do minor surgery, but when the doctor cut her tongue open, a live roach crawled out.
Supposedly, there were roach eggs on the seal of the envelope. The egg was able to hatch inside of the lady’s tongue because of her warm and moist saliva.
Cockroach eggs
There are several different versions of stories about people who accidentally got infested with roach eggs in their mouths or salivary glands, then experienced a disgusting mouthful of hatched roaches. Some versions say a person got infected with the eggs by eating contaminated meat from a fast food restaurant. Other versions say roach eggs have been picked up by licking envelopes. The stories claim there have been reports on CNN and in the New York Times. Actually, there have been no documented cases of this happening and it has been a common urban legend for quite some time.
A picture of a roach egg capsule is shown to give you some idea of how large these things are. Imagine licking something the size of a Planter's Premium cashew and not noticing it. Don’t you just love these urban legends?
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15 Sep 2008, 16:44