A woman in Texas woke up after jaw surgery with a British accent.
Lisa Alamia, 33, was only scheduled to have corrective surgery to fix an overbite at Houston’s Methodist Sugar Land Hospital last December, but when the surgery was over, she woke up with the very rare “foreign accent syndrome.”
"I was very shocked," she told ABC News. "I didn't know how to take it. I was very confused. I said 'Ya'll' all the time before the accent. Once I got the accent, I started noticing I'd say, 'You all.'"
Her kids thought she was joking.
“My daughter laughs at the way I say ‘tamales.’ I used to be able to say it like a real Hispanic girl,” Alamia told KHOU. “Now, I cannot.”
Globally, foreign accent syndrome has only been documented 100 times in the past 100 years and is usually the result of a brain injury. In Alamia’s case, however, neurological tests were all normal.
“This is a fascinating and very rare case,” said neurologist Toby Yaltho at the Houston Methodist Sugar Land Neurology Associates, in a release. “Most neurologists work their entire careers and never come across FAS.”
There is no cure, but the accent has been known to diminish over time.
