Lebab (Part 1)

The doctor walked into the lobby of his Lower-East-Side medical clinic while sipping his morning ‘cup of Joe’. He was pleasantly surprised to see a ‘full house’ of patients already congregated in the waiting room.

“You aren’t going to believe this but everyone in the waiting room is complaining of the same general symptoms.”; The receptionist exclaimed. “I hope we don’t have some sort of epidemic on our hands! “; She added nervously.

“And what sort of ‘symptoms’ are they complaining of?”; He inquired. A minor hint of annoyance was present in his voice. If there was one thing he didn’t need, it was a receptionist practicing ‘armchair medicine’ and causing a panic among the patients.

“They’re all complaining of mouth, tongue, and muscle aches on the lower halves of their faces. We don’t have a single person who has a different reason for being here.”

“I’d hope mandible related pain would be focused on the lower half of the face since nobody has a jaw on the upper half!”; The doctor remarked cheekily. He smirked outwardly at her oversimplification of things. It was probably a typical case of ‘chicken little syndrome’ but he had to admit that it did sound a bit suspicious. Ultimately he decided to reserve final judgement until after he had examined several patients. From there he could compare his findings and look for possible correlation. He put his briefcase on his desk and signaled the nurse to usher in the first patient.

“Hello Mrs. Kavinski, I’m Doctor Barnes.” He announced. Quickly he skimmed the relevant facts of her chart as she stepped into the room. “Tell me what brought you here this morning? Where exactly does it hurt?”

The elderly Polish lady appeared a little amused at something but it wasn’t readily apparent to him what it was. She spoke with a soft, quavering voice that befitted her advanced age and diminutive stature. “I must confess doctor, I was dreading trying to explain my symptoms because of the language barrier but your mastery of my mother tongue is superb! You speak like you grew up in my little Polish hometown, near the German border!”

It was now his turn to be perplexed. “I don’t understand what you mean, ma’am.”; He replied apologetically. “I don’t know any Polish words. I just spoke to you in English; and you spoke back to me in English also.” He waited to gauge her expression. Silently he wondered how lucid she was in her elderly age.

Mrs. Kravinski had a delightful, dainty laugh which echoed through the tiny examination room. “Oh Doctor, you are pulling my leg with your silly joke! Please don’t make this old lady laugh any more. My jaw and cheeks already ache. Can you please help me?”

Deciding to ignore her confusion about which language they were conversing in, he focused his attention on her medical concerns. Senility issues were possible but his primary purpose was to help with her physical ailments. He would leave the psychological diagnoses to the professionals who specialized in that field.

After examining her neck for tell-tale signs of swelling, he failed to locate any evidence of bacterial or viral infection. Her throat and tonsils also looked completely normal. He didn’t doubt that she was in discomfort but with no physical signs of infection or recent jaw injury; there wasn’t much he could do. He wrote her a prescription for a stronger pain reliever and instructed her to come back in a few days if the discomfort didn’t go away.

His next patient was an Asian man in his early 20’s. Dr. Barnes motioned the man into the examination room and pointed at the paper clad bench.

“Do you want me to take off my shirt before I sit down?”; The man inquired.

“Oh, good. You speak English! I guess we can dispense with translators and inefficient hand gestures then. Yes, go ahead and remove your shirt.”

The patient frowned. “No sir. I do not speak any English yet. I have been meaning to learn but the entire staff of the company I work for speaks Mandarin Chinese so it hasn’t become a necessity yet. I will need to for my Visa application if the company sponsors me however.”; He added politely.

Dr. Barnes laughed. “You’re off to an excellent start young man! Not only did you speak in perfect English, but you also did so with an American inflection. I’d think you grew up in Brooklyn if I didn’t know better.”

Out of respect for age and authority, the young man didn’t want to contradict the doctor. He just nodded his head and smiled nervously. Instead he explained that his neck and jaw pain began the day before and had gotten increasingly worse as time wore on. Once again the examination failed to uncover any evidence of infection and the patient had no recollection of a recent jaw injury to suggest TMJ, or similar affliction.

The rest of the business day was basically the same. The last patient he examined had moved to Manhattan from the Deep South. She surprised him by complimenting his ‘beautiful Southern drawl’. When he explained he had never even been to the South, she looked at him the same skeptical way that he had toward Mrs. Kavinski! In the end it wasn’t worth ‘opening up a can of confrontational worms’ and arguing over a minor perception disagreement. He had a job to do. One that was becoming increasingly more frustrating.

The reoccurring symptoms and linguistic confusion he witnessed in his patients, stuck in his head. Like all the others, the Southern Belle’s symptoms were not verifiable by standard medical protocols. Having dozens of patients from all ethic backgrounds, ages and walks of life complaining of the same basic issues was impossible to dismiss as coincidence. ‘Something’ was definitely up.

On the way home, he could only shake his head and marvel at the weird coincidences. It was as if there was mass delusion and a body area-specific, hypochondria ‘bug’ floating around. As unlikely as it might seem, he knew they couldn’t all be delusional. Their glands may not have shown signs of infection but the sheer number of cases pointed to a legitimate, obscure affliction. After committing some serious thought to the matter during his long drive home, he realized there were some interesting parallels to Carpel tunnel syndrome.

Just like the mystery ‘outbreak’, Carpel tunnel syndrome didn’t usually manifest itself with physical swelling. It was caused by excessive, repetitive overuse of fingers and wrists to the point of chronic fatigue. His patients may have been dealing with something similar but what common activity could explain so many experiencing neck, jaw and tongue pain? If they had all just taken jobs as telemarketers it might have made sense; but their listed occupations were as diverse as their backgrounds. On the surface, he couldn’t see anything they had in common besides their mystery condition.

At home Doctor Barnes walked into the kitchen and kissed his wife. Her wince in discomfort spoke volumes. “Don’t tell me you have jaw and neck pain too!”: He lamented incredulously. Even if contagious, he knew he hadn’t been there long enough to infect her with the mystery illness yet.

“Yes, the sides of my cheeks and tongue must be swollen because they ache like crazy. I think the girls must have it too. They have been cranky and irritable all day; while complaining about the same thing. Is there something going around? You’ll have to take a look at us after dinner.”; She concluded.

He could only nod since he was all-too-aware that ‘something’ was ‘going around’. Unfortunately he had no idea what it was, or what to do about it. He explained that all of his patients had the same mysterious symptoms but their lab tests had came back negative for traditional culprits. Worse still, he was starting to feel the same unexplainable ache that had been described to him so many times that day.

During dinner, the telephone rang 3 times in rapid succession but it was ignored. They had a house rule about having a peaceful meal without fielding questions from family and friends seeking free medical ‘advice’. Soon however it became apparent that the caller was not going to relent until it was answered. The doctor wasn’t even surprised by what the insistent caller told him.

An esteemed colleague from the CDC explained that the ‘sore jaw condition’ was rapidly becoming a universal phenomenon. Cases were being reported all over the globe. After listening intently, Dr. Barnes shared his reoccurring experience that day at the clinic of language confusion from his patients. He also mentioned the curious parallels he noticed between common symptoms of the mystery illness and repetitive muscle injury conditions. His colleague admitted they were aware of linguistic confusion as a prominent symptom but hadn’t made any connection to tendinitis or carpel tunnel. His friend thanked him for his astute, observational insights and promised to keep him ‘in the loop’ as more details developed.

During ‘family time’ that night, Doctor Barnes pulled out an old home movie to watch with his wife and the girls. Almost immediately he noticed the audio portion was damaged. The recorded background noises sounded completely normal but all human voices were garbled and indecipherable. Another home movie started out fine with their new puppy barking excitedly but as soon as the children started speaking, it too was garbled. In defiance of the perplexing situation, he opened a brand new, shrink wrapped DVD adventure film they had been planning to watch. Unbelievably, it also had the same issue. When he pulled out their camcorder and recorded themselves talking about random things, the playback was completely normal! He and his wife looked at each other exasperatedly in light of the bizarre development.

Every recording of music or video they had in the house had a damaged voice track, but music or nonhuman sounds on the same media played normally. Any new recordings they made were perfectly understandable and had no voice garbling. The implications were incomprehensible, staggering and quite frankly, frightening! He called his colleague back at the CDC to apprise him of the latest development but had to leave a voice mail. There was no answer.

A quick survey of the news verified their experience was not unique. All the channels were abuzz about the strange phenomenon and the damage to human voice recordings worldwide, prior to the day before. Every telecast had scientific experts struggling to offer possible explanations for it all. None of what Dr. Barnes heard from the ‘talking heads’ made any sense to him.

From terrorist gas attacks and water supply poisoning, to electromagnetic pulse waves on a global scale; all the far-out theories failed to explain ‘how’ such a feat could be accomplished by existing technology, or ‘why’ someone would even want to. It didn’t seem like the actions of a terrorist or radical political organization. It was as if theorists were wildly grasping at straws in absence of concrete facts, or logical scientific data.

The more pieces of the unfolding puzzle that were presented in news reports, the more wacky theories were suggested to explain them. When it was officially announced that people across the planet were able to understand each other perfectly without translators, Dr. Barnes reflected on his confusing day. One by one the bizarre pieces fell into place. He had a startling epiphany that almost made him tremble:
——–
The reason so many people across the world were complaining of neck and mandible pain was because they were unknowingly communicating in a different language. One where their tongue and jaw muscles were not used to forming the words. This alien effort and unnatural motion of the speech organs brought about a carpel-tunnel like neck, mouth and tongue pain.

Despite the native language everyone believed they were hearing and speaking, it was actually a foreign tongue. It was the only possible explanation for why a Chinese man and Polish lady could mistakenly believe they were speaking the same language as the doctor. It also explained why older recordings of the human voice sounded nonsensical.
———
His movie and music library were not really damaged, as he had initially believed. The world’s population was simply no longer capable of understanding their mother tongue. For the first time in modern history, man was speaking and hearing a universal language of unknown origin. It was just like the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, but in reverse! All languages and dialects on Earth had somehow been condensed back into one! Dr. Barnes excitedly dialed his friend at the CDC again to share his remarkable new theory.

End of part 1