Some years ago a college student filmed himself attempting this with 40 feet of dental floss, using a pen cap tied to the end to help it move through his digestive system. He called it the Body Floss experiment. Two and a half days later the pen cap emerged, and thanks to having tied the other end of the floss to his teeth he had a string passing entirely through his body.
The video is available on YouTube:
Caution: harsh language.
re the kitty who ate the string…several years ago i watched a show on one of the learning type channels…animal planet?..discovery?..it was about a lion in a zoo who had eaten a ball of yarn…thrown into it’s cage by someone who thought the big kitty would like to play with some yarn, no doubt…the show documented with photos and interviews etc what happened…
after a few days the lion’s keeper noticed the end of the yarn dangling under the lion’s tail and called in the zoo’s vet…the vet knew that the yarn would be all tangled up in the intestines and so did surgery on the lion (the average zoo lion being a bit more valuable than the average house cat)…he had to open up the lion’s entire abdomen and then make incisions in the intestines every six inches or so …he cut off the yarn he could reach and removed it…closed the incision and moved on to the next incision…the operation took many hours…
wish i could remember what zoo it was…
by the way…cats can’t spit things like yarn out…they have backward facing spines on their tongues (that’s why their tongues feel so rough) and anything that gets onto those spines is likely to go down the gullet…
The documentary “Crumb” included interviews with Robert Crumb’s brother Robert, and the film depicted him swallowing cloth. If my memory serves, the cloth was passing clear through and coming out the other end, but they did not show that in the movie.
I’ve seen it on DVD, and I remember nothing visible other than some verrrrrry slow swallowing.
Dental floss? Worst Option Ever. Something designed to not break apart when rubbed against the hardest material in the whole body, snaking around some of the softest and most important parts?!?!