A young woman can no longer close her mouth after yawning. It took four doctors and four hours to straighten the blocked jaw.
21-year-old American Jenna Sinatra needed emergency care after simply yawning. As she reports in a TikTok video, when she yawned, her jaw locked up so badly that she could no longer close her mouth. She had to be taken to the local emergency room in Manahawkin, New Jersey.
“I was on the way home from the gym with my brother. “He thought I was pranking him, but I wasn’t,” Jenna Sinatra tells Inside Edition. After a simple yawn, her jaw just fell open. “It just wouldn’t close,” Sinatra says.
The diagnosis: temporomandibular joint disorder, a condition in which the joints that connect the jawbone to the skull no longer function properly. In Sinatra’s case, the joints had come apart.
It took four doctors and four hours to get Sinatra’s jaw back into the correct position. They bound her head to ensure her jaw stayed closed. “They gave me medication to help relax my jaw,” she says.
Dr. Nancy Rosen, a New York City dentist, told Inside Edition that she had seen lockjaw cases like Sinatra’s before.
“What happens is that the muscles spasm and the lower jaw slips out of position, which can lead to lockjaw,” says Rosen.
The Austrian news site “Heute” also reported that this type of TMJ injury, which leaves the mouth hanging open, is classified as “rare.” There are various reasons that can lead to a lockjaw, as the medical portal “Mooci” reports.
These include dislocations of the jaw, a broken jaw, a misalignment of the jaw, grinding teeth at night, swelling in the oral mucosa, joint effusions, tumors or age-related wear and tear on the joint (osteoarthritis). Lockjaw can also occur after surgery to remove wisdom teeth.
It’s not just Jenna’s case that is extraordinary. A TikToker collapsed in the waiting room of a London emergency room despite being completely healthy. With the words “Help, I’m dying,” she sought attention through dubious means.
After rapid weight loss, a doctor diagnosed Bella Johnston, then 14, with an eating disorder. The young woman suffers from a rare type of cancer that almost costs her life due to the misdiagnosis.
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