A woman was posting a letter one day, and happened to cut her tongue on the envelope. It hurt, but she thought no more about it until a couple of days later, when the cut began to swell. It was painful too. Hoping that it was nothing more than a passing infection, the woman delayed going to her doctor. By the time she finally gave in and made an appointment, the swelling was the size of the tip of her thumb, and she could barely eat.
The doctor took one look at the swelling and pronounced it infected. Deciding to treat it immediately, he applied some topical anaesthetic, and then reopened the cut with a scalpel. To his horror, out of the flesh of the woman's tongue came tumbling a small but living cockroach.
It took a while and a lot of questions to piece together what had happened. The envelope the woman used had been resting in a drawer for years before she got to it. In that time a cockroach must have happened by and laid its eggs there. They became stuck to the envelope glue, and didn't germinate until they found themselves in the warm, wet environment of the woman's tongue. Ever since she cut herself with the envelope, the roach had been there, buried, growing like a seed about to sprout.
No comments:
Post a Comment