'The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain': American woman sedated for dental surgery wakes with British accent

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Updated: 04:29 EST, 2 June 2011

Most of us fear walking out of the dentist’s surgery with a sore mouth and a hefty bill.

But one American’s visit proved a little more traumatic – after she left with an English accent.

Karen Butler, from Toledo, Oregon, has never travelled further than Mexico, but is now coming to terms with strangers asking her ‘about bangers and chips’.

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Confusing: Karen Butler woke after oral surgery to find her American accent changed to sound British and then more like a Transylvanian count

The 56-year-old tax adviser was given an anaesthetic a year and a half ago while her dentist removed several teeth.

She said: ‘I woke up and my mouth was all sore and swollen, and I talked funny. The dentist said, “You’ll talk normally when the swelling goes down.”’

But while the swelling did go down, her voice did not change.

Neurologist Ted Lowenkopf, of the Providence Stroke Centre in Oregon, diagnosed her with foreign accent syndrome, a rare neurological disorder.

He suspects Miss Butler suffered a small stroke which damaged the part of her brain that affects speech pattern and intonation.

The accent remained and has now transformed into a more German or eastern European sounding voice.

Speaking to the Oregonian, the mother of five said her family at first treated the bizarre affliction as a joke.

One daughter even recorded her mother saying the phrase, 'I am going to suck your blood' in her trademark trademark Transylvanian accent as a ring tone on her cell phone.

She said: 'When it first happened and we didn't know what it was, all kinds of ideas were handed up as possibilities.

'I'm very lucky it was not something that was devastating,' she added.

'On a scale of one to 100 this doesn't even come up to a one.'

The condition is so rare in fact that only around 60 cases have been reported worldwide since the 1900's.

Sufferers usually gain their new found voices after severe head trauma such as shrapnel wounds acquired in combat, or after strokes.

It appears Mrs Butler has suffered neither of these and her doctor and it is still unclear what caused her speech pattern to change.

Dental surgery is not associated with the syndrome and the drug that was used to sedate Mrs Butler - Halcion -  has not been linked to strokes.

Like many diagnosed with the syndrome, Mrs Butler has never visited the country, or in her case countries, that her voice has chosen to imitate.

Like Mrs Butler, many sufferers see their accent change over time.

Neurologist William Katz from the University of Texas at Dallas, has studied a number of patients since 1987 in his speech lab.

He said: 'We want to understand the circuits that underlie it and what we can do to fix it.

'It's kind of puzzling. Sometimes patients get very frustrated.'

Change: Usually severe head trauma or stroke can cause the extremely rare voice altering condition to occur - not just simple surgery

Recently he failed in an attempt to retrain the speech patterns of a Dallas woman who acquired a Swedish accent.

Mrs Butler however has doubts she could be retrained to speak like she did before.

She said: 'Others can pretend to talk in different ways.

'I can't. That's gone.'

But for all the downsides, Mrs Butler has lost her painful shyness.

She added: 'Before I was just an ordinary person.

'Now everybody is intrigued. They want to know where you're from. So I've learned in the last year that it's OK to be social. I like it actually.'