Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Sasha.
Sasha is one of my favorite Lab patients, but, being a Labrador, she’s one of those sorts to whom _things_ tend to happen.

Case in point. A few weeks ago Sasha was swimming in the river. We got a panicked call from her male owner when Sasha got out of the river. The call was “I’m on my way bringing Sasha in! Her tongue is pinned to her nose!!”
This is what we found when he brought Sasha, still dripping, into the hospital.

Sasha Full Face

Yes, that is a treble fishing hook pierced into Sasha’s schnoz. What the full face photo doesn’t show is what we found after we’d sedated Sasha to get the hook out of her nose. I kinda wondered if there was something else going on with her tongue because she was doing a lot of licking. So we sedated her. And what we found was this:

Tongue

And yes, that is a _second_ treble hook pierced into the under side of Sasha’s tongue.
The owner told us that Sasha’s tongue really was attached to her nose after she got out of the river. It was only the fact that two young fishers a little downstream had had a pair of scissors with which to clip the line that was attached to the two treble hooks (no, it wasn’t their gear that pierced Sasha) that allowed Sasha to reel her tongue back in before she got to us.

It was actually a fairly easy thing to un-hook Sasha and she suffered no lasting harm, but the photos still make me wince.