Monday, July 24, 2006

would this be like swallowing your plate? or the dinner table?

I'm sure this has been all over the television news, but I just read about Houdini, the python who swallowed his electric blanket. His owner thinks somehow the blanket got tangled up with Houdini's dinner and the snake just kept swallowing. Because you know, that's what snakes do; they're not really built to puke.

Poor dear. If surgery photos don't squick you out, it's sort of fascinating to see how the vets set up their operating table and draped the patient. The x-rays are pretty cool too.

My question--after, of course, how is he doing?--is about the site of the incision. All 18 inches of it. I had a knee surgery in 1998 that left me with a three-inch-long scar, and I still have a little numbness along one side of it. Is Houdini going to be numb along his scar? Are snake nerves like ours, sort of a ramen-like tangle just under the skin?

edit I went looking for "snake nerves" and ended up going down the Internet rabbit hole; now I'm fixated on a Sephardic Italian lady who won a Nobel Prize in medicine for work she did in a clandestine lab. Which is obviously something else altogether. So let's just stick with Houdini for this post.