My middle daughter gave herself a frenotomy by running across a yard looking
over her shoulder and turning around just in time to run into a clothesline.
 She was about 11 yrs old at the time.  It bleed for about a minute, looked
rather shocking, and I took her to the pedi.  He explained what had been
severed was her labial frenum, and said this was no big deal at all.
 Interestingly, she had (like her father and younger sister) a gap between
her front teeth.  The gap has sinced closed on its own.  Her younger sister
(who wasn't so 'lucky') has not run into any clotheslines, and has cost me
big bucks for a plastic mouth piece to close the gap in her teeth. Surely to
goodness a quick snip with sharp scissors couldn't be much of a big deal at
all if a blunt object like a rope clothes line did so little damage.  I am
now looking at the labial frenums of all the babies I see.  I don't have much
of a sense of what they should look like normally, but if I check enough
babies I hope to get a sense of the varieties of frenum presentations.  I
hope Brian Palmer will have slides of normal and abnormal frenums to show us
this summer.
Barbara Wilson-Clay, BSE, IBCLC
priv. pract, Austin, Tx