Navicular Envy and Slug Sex

It’s probably a good thing that my cataract surgery patients are in the twilight zone during surgery.  Conversations are often random, and, um, difficult to explain.  Hence the strange title of today’s post.

It all started innocently enough.  The surg tech who helps me injured her foot running on the dreadmill treadmill.  She fears she might have a stress fracture in her foot, probably from wearing minimalist shoes (Skele-toes.)  I can certainly sympathize with that, having dealt with a stress fracture in my tibia last year.

So between cases she had one of our local podiatrists look at her x-rays.  After checking the x-ray, she was concerned that our surg tech may have a stress problem.  But she also commented that her navicular bone was particularly nice.  Attractive, even.  For a bone.

“Are you hitting on me?” our surg tech quipped.

Nice navicular, babe!

This begat a random conversation about the sexiness (is that a word?) of a navicular bone.

“Hey babe!  Nice navicular!”

“What’s a nice navicular like you doing in a place like this?”

“Do you come here to be imaged often?”

I think the rest of us, those with mundane naviculars, were suffering navicular envy.  After all, some of us have cold feet.  There’s shrinkage!

Then the radio announcer came on with a call-in contest where you have to answer a question of the day.  The question today was, how long can a snail sleep without eating?  Now I don’t know about you, but I sleep every night without eating, but I don’t think that is what they meant.  The DJ further added that the answer was according to Wiki answers.  So the first caller won, being the fastest to surf the net and then call the station.

Three years.

Seriously?  How do you sleep for three years, with or without food?  I know snails are slow, but that is ridiculous!

But before the answer was revealed, there was the requisite discussion amongst the operating room staff.

Our circulating nurse offered that cockroaches can survive 90 days without eating.  In fact, they can survive without their heads.

What kind of life is that?  Three months without your head.  Obviously, you couldn’t eat if you wanted to at that point.  You couldn’t communicate with other cockroaches.  You couldn’t see where you were going.  Why would you even want to go anywhere?  I don’t know what the quality of life is for the average cockroach, but I would imagine that it is diminshed even further by the lack of one’s head.

If you only had three months to live, would you want to live that time without your head?  And, according to this article, it may be only weeks they can survive.  The head can survive too, “waving its antennae back and forth for several hours until it runs out of steam. . .  If given nutrients and refrigerated, a roach head can last even longer.”  Isn’t that good to know?

But that was cockroaches.  She thought snails reproduced by extruding something out of their mouths that contacted another snail doing the same.  But then she corrected herself.  That was slugs, not snails.

Unprotected Slug Porn

I’m not sure how you get from headless cockroaches to slug porn, but by God we did it.

I wonder if I can count this toward continuing medical education?

Probably not, unless I start treating cockroaches and horny slugs.