My #1 Rule Regarding Household Pets: They must reciprocate love. A creature that purrs or wags its tail or licks your hand or coos or offers any gesture of appreciation is a genuine pet. All other domesticated animals are just animated knickknacks in my opinion. Forget fish. They can't even survive in our atmosphere. Snakes and rodents are as cute as shards of glass. Reptiles have as much personality as processed cheese. Dogs, cats, and birds qualify. Most others fail my #1 rule.
My wife Rebecca would disagree. She has nursed surly reptiles and boring chameleons that I never bonded with. I always felt I was disrupting their dreams of insect conquest.
With one exception. An iguana.
It was a surprise gift to my wife. Not from me. I'd never give a living creature as a present. But Rebecca happily accepted it from a friend and named her new pet Elvis.
The iguana was a lime-green cigar with legs and a tail. We assumed it would eventually grow into a miniature crocodile with a spiky Mohawk down its back. Not the case. Some iguanas a small, just like some dogs. Elvis didn't grow. We thought of it as a pygmy iguana.
The poor critter was paranoid. Whenever we put our hands into his terrarium, he darted about the transparent cubicle in abject terror. Elvis abhorred human contact. Which broke my #1 rule. I hated that. But it was my wife's pet, so Elvis stayed in a glass prison cell by the window where he ate kale and live crickets and lived the sedentary life of a captive pygmy reptile.
One afternoon, Rebecca pointed out that Elvis hadn't crapped in days and something was stuck in his rectum. An iguana's anus lies at the rear of the torso just below the thick base of the tail… exactly where you'd expect it to be. At first glance, Elvis seemed to be expelling something pinkish. On closer inspection, the protrusion was actually part of the creature. My wife rushed her pet to the veterinarian, and here's what the doctor told us.
Our pygmy iguana had a prolapsed rectum.
Imagine turning your colon inside out like a pair of socks. That's a prolapsed rectum. (Yes, it happens to humans, too.) The vet's solution was to stuff Elvis' colon back inside and suture his anus to prevent a recurrence. This appeased my fretful wife.
Soon, Elvis was back home devouring kale and crickets. But the suture was too tight. He couldn't crap at all. Back to the doctor we went. Days later, the second suture failed and Elvis' little pink rectum protruded again from beneath his scaly tail. Several more trips to the vet followed, all to no avail.
The doctor said we'd reached the last resort. Whenever the rectum popped out, we'd have to shove it back in. Here's how:
You'll need a cotton swab and petroleum jelly. Gently grab the pygmy iguana by the torso with one hand and flip it upside down. With your free hand, dip the cotton swab into the lubricant. A little dab'll do ya. Then use the greasy swab to gently push the creature's rectum back into place. If the pink anus immediately pops back out, repeat the process. Don't jab angrily! That will only cause the iguana undue suffering. Be gentle and patient. Hopefully, the rectum will remain intact. If not, repeat these steps as often as necessary… for the rest of its friggin' life.
Rebecca accepted the duty.
However, my wife's job included traveling. She was often away from home for weeks on end. During her travels, Elvis' welfare became my responsibility.
Everything went smoothly. I occasionally corrected the animal's prolapses like I'd been taught. No big deal. In fact, the treatment became blasé. I felt worthy of a veterinary degree.
One evening when I brought Elvis' meal of crickets and kale, I saw that his pink inside was outside. Ho hum. Here we go again. I grabbed my makeshift veterinary utensils to rectify his rectum. I grasped the wriggling iguana in my left hand and used my right hand to dip a cotton swab into petroleum jelly.
Then calamity struck.
Maybe I was too casual about it. Or maybe my bad mood that day made me careless. Or maybe Elvis was determined to prevent me from shoving that oily swab up his ass.
The pygmy iguana squirmed and attempted to leap away. Almost free from my grasp, I caught its tail. Then Elvis fell to the floor and scurried off.
Four inches of slithering tail had snapped off in my hand with no iguana attached!
Ahhhhhhhh! It writhed in my palm! I dropped the tail on the floor where it continued to wriggle as if still receiving brain impulses. Two tiny drops of red iguana blood dotted the carpet, not the gruesome mess I expected. The wiggling tail entranced me like a cheap Roger Corman special effect. Then I freaked out.
I was sure I'd killed Elvis.
Where did the torso go? No sign of the runt. Not under the sofa. Not in the terrarium. Not between the cabinet and the wall. Where'd he go?
Down on all fours, I spotted Elvis underneath the bookcase. I struggled to move the heavy piece of furniture and then captured the iguana. I suspected it had bled to death, but I saw no blood flow, just a red stump where the tail used to be. And why was it still moving? Maybe for the same reason the tail was still moving. Whatever reason that was.
The tail had been severed for five minutes while I searched for its owner, and the tail kept squirming. Not by much, though. The flailing had subsided to a slow wiggle. I looked for some means of reattaching the dead tail and even pressed it against Elvis' stump as if it might magically mend itself.
I lowered him into his terrarium, resigned to the probability that I'd killed poor Elvis, the pygmy iguana with the prolapsed rectum that now had no tail. And I placed the tail in there, too, in case a miracle occurred. You never know with nature.
Flustered and guilt-stricken, I phoned my wife.
"Bad news," I said. "I broke the iguana."
"Huh?"
Then I explained the entire mishap.
"Is it breathing?" she asked.
"I don't know! You want me to give it mouth-to-mouth?"
She assured me that Elvis would survive. Iguanas' tails snap off as a defense mechanism, she explained, and they self-cauterize when severed. The tail would grow back eventually.
I had no idea about any of that. Nature is pretty damn weird.
To my relief, the iguana lived. My wife returned home and all was well. The tail grew back to full length surprisingly quickly. But the anus kept popping out.
Months later, we found the iguana dead. His passing actually saddened me. Although the iguana routinely violated Rule #1, I'd grown accustomed to – and somewhat proud of – the cotton swab routine. Nursing an ailing pet can be as rewarding as receiving its love, I suppose.
Fortunately, Elvis died with his rectum inside his torso where it belonged. We took some comfort in that.
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