New Delhi:
Imagine sleeping in with an accent you are used to your whole life only to find some foreign accent coming out of your mouth the next morning. For one Aussie woman, the ‘impossible’ accent transformation overnight became a reality when, she woke up with a thick "Oireland’’ accent, after suffering a massive migraine.
Kate Baggs, from Melbourne, Australia suffered from hemiplegic migraines, an extreme type that causes symptoms similar to a stroke, including paralysis on the left side, inability to talk or walk. Her condition however took a strange side, when she woke up with a foreign accent she never spoke or learnt.
It began soon after a particularly brutal migraine, said Kate, "I was at the shop buying a toothbrush and I started the sentence sounding like the Australian me and by the end of the sentence I realised something was odd.
"My godmother thought I was making a joke, mimicking something from a movie we were talking about.
"It's been Irish ever since and it doesn't show any signs of going away anytime soon.
"I had no control over it but I thought 'that sounds really funny.'
"It's constant, it's not an accent I've been exposed to, I don't have interactions with anyone with an Irish accent."
The Aussie first had an episode in 2015, where she got a migraine so bad she had to learn how to talk again. But when she did, her accent had turned Canadian.
"The first time I had a stroke-like migraine, it took me two months to learn how to speak again and when I did speak, I had a Canadian accent," Kate explains.
Adding further that the Irish accent faded away in some time, she said, "It only lasted a couple of months, it faded quite quickly and went back to my Australian accent.
"The most the doctors can understand is that the migraines are probably happening at the speech and language centre of my brain."
She also adds that the brief stint of having a foreign accent made her to even release a video to her friends to explain why every time they call a random Irish woman has been answering the call. Following the incident, Kate has been through several MRIs and scans over the years, which have shown there is no damage on her brain.
She is currently taking preventive medication to stop the episodes.
