Whatta, whatta

What a weekend, what a day. Besides having to do more chores than usual while my wife is convalescing from knee surgery, I had to tend to Siegfried's special needs this weekend and today. He threw up on the parlor rug after breakfast on Saturday, then again an hour later on the guest bed, and I spent about three hours driving over to Chapel Hill to have him examined by a veterinarian, who asked me whether he had ingested anything "unusual."
    No, I didn't think so...The vet did some blood tests and injected Siegfried with an anti-emetic, then sent us home with nine milder anti-emetic tablets for Siegfried to take every eight hours for the next three days. And, by the way, canned food only for three to five days. And give him an acid-reducer tablet twice a day.
    Late that afternoon Siegfried passed the first of something that must have been altogether about five feet long...maybe an intestinal worm, maybe plant material (long leaves, fronds?) from the yard—but how could he have swallowed something that long?
    Anyway, the poor boy was pretty dirty and stinky after all that, and the efforts I made to clean him up hadn't been particularly effective. This morning, after sending to the vet a photograph of the last foot of whatever Siegfried had passed, as about 3 a.m. on Sunday—I was betting on a worm, in which case the photo showed its "upper body" and head—it was off to Elliotte's Pet Spa for a proper bath for Siegfried while I went back to Chapel Hill, this time for some allergy testing to see whether my antigen serum needed to be changed or, if I were lucky, my injections suspended altogether because I may have built up immunities to everything I've been injecting for. As I said, another one of those days. At least the better result came of the allergy testing: no reactions to the twenty or thirty dabs of allergens that had been applied to my forearms.
    And as I was leaving the ENT office, the vet's receptionist called. "Definitely not a worm."

Okay. I guess I'll have to accept my wife's verdict. Packing material, surely not swallowed in a long strand, although I suppose it's possible. Never thought of Siegfried as being so goat-like, but indeed we have caught him a time or two chewing those yellow envelopes that are lined with bubble wrap....
    Can you tell from the photograph shown below whether she's right? Is that packing material? (It's the first four feet of what Siegfried passed, late Saturday afternoon.)
    While it's questionable whether you should ever put a poop picture on your blog, you have to admit you've probably eaten something very delicious at a restaurant that looked pretty much identical to what is shown in the photograph below. Think of it as a meal. Apparently that's what Siegfried had done (when taking it into the opposite end of the tube that runs through his body the same way a tube runs through the body of each of us multicellular organisms).

The main thing is Siegfried's much better, but we'll continue the anti-emetics and acid-reducers, and I'll feed him canned food for another day or two.
    I've washed all of the bedding and everything's spic and span again.
    What a boy.
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November 20: This morning I realized what Siegfried probably ingested: my almost-depleted roll of 1-inch 3M Transpore tape. See about half an inch worth in the photo on the left below, then compare it with the detail on the right from the photo I sent to the vet (but didn't show above—you do not want to see the whole photo):

 

    By my estimate of the length of the object Siegfried passed, there appears to have been about five feet of tape left on the roll, and of course Siegfried would have been able to swallow something five feet long when it was rolled up....
   My wife says it appears that Siegfried did swallow a worm—a tape worm!