Surgery

As Wendy mentioned in her comment on the last post, watching prime time programming is often much more educational than you might think. For one, I'm now a genius at crime scenes. Criminals 'round the world- beware! I will find that stray epithelial or partial print. Professional that I am, I was horridly disappointed when Paddy's car was stolen 18 months ago and the officers didn't bother to check for shoe impressions or even dust the car the theives had left next to it for fingerprints. C'mon, guys, I know better than that. If I but had access to CODIS...

But, I digress. Television, particularly my madre's obsession with the "ER" of yesteryear, (before the tank rolled down the streets of Chicago and ruined it for any viewers with any sense of reality) has turned out to be quite handy. For example:

My 7 and a half year old sister, Megan, is a tender soul. Thus, her soft heart was nearly shattered yesterday when my parent's household had a medical emergency. This is a photograph of a very intact stuffed Husky dog from Build-A-Bear.


This one is actually Maddi's dog, Brody, but he serves as a good example. Megan's dog, Morgan, used to be identical. That is, until she accidentally left it in the yard with Lupe and her doggie-aunt, Indy. The carnage:

Disheveled, and missing an eye... and a nasty looking laceration on the lower back.

Worst of all, piles of stuffing and (gasp) the heart.

(The careful observer will note the right eyeball nestled in the cotton tufts. Sadly, there is not enough remaining tissue on the eye to safely reconnect it to the socket. The optic nerve appears to have been totally severed, and significant damage was done to the eye itself by the offenders.)

Naturally, the disaster occurs with no identifiable mother figure in the vicinity. Luckily, highly skilled surgeon-watcher Kris is on call.
The delicate reconstruction begins. Carefully, the blades of grass are removed from the cotton stuffing, which is then reinserted into the abdominal cavity via the back laceration. Precise stitching follows with silver medical thread. ("Lucky that we had gray!" an increasingly cheerful Megan exclaims.) Careful repairs begin on the upper right quadrant of the face. (Megan considers and then declines the offer for a prosthetic button eye.) Care is taken by the surgeon to avoid further matting of the dirty coat. (Read: Kris tries very hard not to touch or smell the fur soaked with dog slobber.)
And, with easy mother-like grace, Dr. Kris suggests the dog will be the very coolest one-eyed pirate dog on the block. ("Could it be a ballerina-pirate dog?" asks a concerned Megan. But of course.) (Not long after, the social worker in Kristie further suggests that the one-eyed ballerina-pirate dog will also make a very compassionate seeing eye dog for the blind.)
The patient is gently placed in a relaxing, bubbly jacuzzi that looks suspiciously like mom's front load washing machine.
After a cycle on "Air fluff, no heat", Morgan makes a full recovery.


Oh, and Megan gets to show off her wicked sweet temporary tatoo. Everyone wins.