MANHATTAN, KS—Medical professionals were unable to resuscitate a woman who died on Friday of this week after swallowing multiple farm animals in what was allegedly an attempt get them to "catch each other."
The decedent is described only as "an old lady," and appears to have died of extensive damage to her jaw, throat, stomach, and other internal organs in her bizarre binge that started late Friday afternoon. A self-described friend to the old lady described the events, stating that she could hear the old lady in her house, sounding quite agitated.
"It must've been around 4:30, 4:45, something like that," stated Harriet Crumb, 62, who lives just south of the old lady. "Out of nowhere I could hear her screaming bloody murder. I went over to see what all the ruckus was about, and she said that she thought she had swallowed a fly. Now, mind you, I don't know why she swallowed that fly, but I thought it was strange. I told her she'd be just fine, and to calm down, but I guess she decided to try something else."
Indeed, the surgeons who attempted to save her life found a common housefly within her stomach, but they also found several other creatures that were apparently swallowed whole, in what appears to have been an attempt to rid the old lady of her predicament.
She seems to have swallowed a spider, perhaps in some ill-conceived attempt to catch the fly. But of course, the spider was larger than the fly, and still presented a problem being in the old woman's stomach, or so she thought. In an odd frenzy, the old woman then consumed her parakeet, cat, and her neighbor's dog in what she believed to be a potential solution to her initial fly situation. Her logic has come into question not only over how she believed this situation would resolve, but also in her choice of the dog she swallowed. The small terrier mix was not much larger than the cat she had devoured, so it may be that she thought it would simply chase the cat out of her now-very-cramped digestive system.
In the most bizarre turn of this story, however, the chief surgeon who worked on the old lady said that, following the ingestion of the dog, she then swallowed a small cow, before attempting to swallow a miniature horse. How she could even move around after the cow was inside of her remains a medical mystery, however, there are multiple tests currently underway.
The coroner is currently awaiting blood test results, as it appears likely that the decedent was under the influence of one or more illicit substances. "That would certainly explain how she got the outlandish idea to start swallowing animals in sequence," stated a spokesperson for the hospital where she was admitted in critical condition. "It would also shed light on how she could dislocate her jaw and jam down an entire bovine. Any other person would have almost certainly stopped after the second hoof."
Although she did not have a reputation for heavy drug use, the old lady's case is likely to go into medical—and perhaps even psychological—textbooks as a bizarre case study.
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