Woman swallows live snake in latest viral video, but is it real?

Levashi, Russia - The internet is a mess after a disturbing animal video surfaced, showing a Russian surgeon pulling a long live snake out of a patients throat. Did the woman swallow a snake, though, or is it all a hoax?

Is that a real snake, or is it all just a big hoax?
Is that a real snake, or is it all just a big hoax?  © Collage: Screenshot/Twitter/@MailOnline

The clip, which surfaced on Twitter and was then made viral by the Daily Mail's coverage, plays out like a scene from a horror movie.

In an operating room, a nurse is using an endoscope to pull something long and slippery out of an anesthetized woman's throat. One of the doctors can be heard saying, "Let's see what this is," and then all hell breaks loose.

As soon as the nurse realizes what is coming of the patient's mouth, she cries out in horror and surprise: It looked like, and turned out to be a snake!

What happened after the woman swallowed a snake?

The reptile turned out to be a whopping four feet long, and there's a visual moment where the surgeons didn't know what to do with it. Luckily, one of them was very fast thinking and grabbed a bucket into which the snake was dropped.

It's unclear whether the snake was still alive when it was removed, nor how long it had been in the woman's body.

According to the Daily Mail, the animal crawled down her throat while she was fast asleep in her garden in the village of Levashi, Dagestan. Feeling unwell in the morning, she sought out the help of a doctor.

Did the woman swallow a snake or is it a hoax?

Locals told the Daily Mail UK that such incidents were very rare, but older citizens do advise young people not to sleep outside as snakes pose risks, and have been known to go into people's mouths.

But let's be real, though: How deep does your sleep have to be for you not to notice a snake crawling into your mouth? Christoph Specht, a medical expert from Germany, doubts that the story is genuine.

"It is extremely unlikely. If it was real, it would be a one of a kind! During a gastrostomy, for example, patients are only able to swallow the endoscope because they are sedated beforehand," he told the German TV channel RTL.

The snake would have triggered a gag reflex when it was going down the woman's throat. On top of that, a four-foot long snake is pretty big and would have been pretty noticeable.

It's highly unlikely that she would only have noticed the morning after. Sometimes, when a story sounds unbelievable, it probably is.

Cover photo: Collage: Screenshot/Twitter/@MailOnline

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