Eat This

Our stomach is snuggling up to this stomach-shaped hairball to celebrate Hairball Awareness Day today. The National Museum of Health and Medicine has many many wonderful specimens, including this incredible hairball, technically called a bezoar. Compulsive hair eating can sometimes lead to the entire stomach filling up with hard-to-digest tangles of hair, which must be surgically removed or dissolved with enzymes to clear the hairball. This particular hairball was removed from a 12-year-old girl who had been eating her own hair since she was 6. Wow!