| Star of the classic Disney film and worldwide children's favourite Pinocchio was today in a "stable but highly critical condition" at the Santobono Hospital, Naples, after serious complications during an operation intended to turn the wooden puppet into a real boy.
"Things began well, but around the halfway point we suspected that something was wrong," explained Dr. Severino Antinori, world authority in ligneomammalian surgery, who headed the medical team. "Skin graft connectivity was not what we expected, and there were problems with organ drainage." Continuing with the procedure was too risky in the face of such difficulties, so the surgeons backtracked and replaced what they could of Pinocchio's original wooden tissue, leaving him alive but in a trauma-induced coma from which he has yet to wake up.
Pinocchio's maker Gepetto was initially too distressed to comment, but a statement issued later through a spokesperson read: "This is the moment every parent dreads, and for a while I just wanted the earth to swallow me up. But I now have hope that Pino will get through this and we will be able to try again."
Antinori's team are "guardedly hopeful" that Pinocchio will wake up within the next two to three days, though they emphatically ruled out attempting the operation again until a thorough investigation has been performed into what went wrong this time.
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