How to...Hernia

Ladies and Gentlemen! Welcome to this next addition of "How to...in Tchad"

Tonight's topic is one that is very dear to all of our hearts and a constant source of revenue for our parent organization, the Bere Adventist Hospital: How to have a hernia in Tchad.

In order to have a really sizable hernia, one that is noticeable even when wearing pants (or one that requires you to give up pants and wear a skirt) one must ignore the hernia one's entire life. It is also helpful to come from an agriculture tradition requiring years of hard, back-breaking labor bent over in a rice field.

One should let it get so big that ones entire collection of small intestines and part of the colon should be able to fit inside if one makes an effort. Making that effort is much more easily achieved under the influence of the local brew. One has many to choose from: cochette (rice wine), arguile (millet wine with a touch of methanol), bili-bili (who knows what fermented in a tasty beverage) as well as your more exotic beer.

If one is going to be operated on, it is much better to wait until after a hard day of bargaining at the market and a serious evening imbibing. Then, through various silly manoeuvres only achievable when dead drunk, one is able to achieve that mass excursion of intestines, colon and sometimes bladder into the hernia sac.

This usually makes if very difficult to push back in (especially when one is draped over a bench with the last calabas of rice wine in hand). This delay allows for swelling of the intestines and sacs to occur leading to what's known as incarceration or strangulation, big words meaning that one will die if not operated on soon!

The best thing to do at this point is to call for your cousin, slash drinking buddy and have him spend your last penny on a motorcycle ride through the bush in the dark so that one can arrive after midnight at the hospital, drunk and penniless.

Not to worry, the surgeon may be groggy, grumpy and disgruntled to find you have nothing to pay with, are sloppily drunk and babbling on the ER table and are alone with an equally smashed and useless cousin, but he will be sure to operate on you to save your life. That way, you don't have to wait for surgery or maybe even pay for it. You never know, those white folks are such suckers!

After a nice, pleasant Ketamine induced dream with a nightmare awakening with all your inhibitions making you see all those things you've repressed and regretted over the years, you wake up on a bloody plastic sheet covered loosely with a hospital gown and an IV dripping into your arm. You start to feel some serious pain in your left groin. You look down and feel a bandage. Feeling lower you realize your left testicle is missing. None of your family has come yet and not only are you waking up from surgery but you have a hangover.

Oh, and that supposed benefit about not paying, the sneaky doctor has gone and left the hernia on your right unfixed so that you'll have to pay him before leaving or the same thing might happen again and suddenly it's looking like it might be better to just have it done electively!

Well, that's it, folks, thanks for tuning in. Next weeks How to...well you just might need a wheelbarrow to carry it in.