As a family, we’ve never liked doctors. You could say we have a blood feud with them. The roots of the hatred go back to the night my great-great-grandfather fell ill and, suspecting he had pneumonia, went to see a physician. After examining him, the doctor told my great-grandfather’s father that there was nothing the matter. That very same night, the poor old man had a stroke and died, from the sheer distress of having paid the doctor’s fee for absolutely nothing. From that moment on, our clan has disowned every physician, healer, specialist and surgeon in existence. The hostility runs so deep, I should add, that once, when my cousin, who worked as a motorbike courier, delivered a parcel to a clinic, the entire extended family ostracised him for three months. In the end, only after his mother swore a thousand oaths were they persuaded to let him back into family gatherings; even now, his food is laid out on the dinner cloth by the toilet door, apart from everyone else.
Unfortunately, avoiding doctors did not stop us from falling ill. But through sustained effort we achieved full self-sufficiency in medicine, and through trial and error we managed to deal with every illness that came our way. Competition between family branches even led us to some remarkable discoveries. Our guiding principle is this: the rarer the natural substance used, and the stranger the route of administration, the more valuable and effective the treatment. Just recently, for instance, my aunt’s husband, in order to treat a condition we call “the grabbers” (we name all our diseases ourselves, to demonstrate our independence; illiterate doctors call this one migraine), attempted to push a mango stone up his nostril and into his brain. Admittedly, one of his nostrils has since lost all sense of smell and his vision in one eye has dropped by five dioptres, but he says the illness is completely cured. When I was a child, my father stirred tomato paste into my milk every day to treat my jaundice. And my aunt, to treat her husband’s fatty liver, gave him three doses of washing-up liquid daily.
Now you may be wondering how, given that we never visit doctors or laboratories, we manage to diagnose these illnesses in the first place. I am pleased to report that, thanks to my grandfather’s vast experience and diagnostic genius, our family has never once faced any difficulty in this regard. The whole family gathers at my grandfather’s house once a month, where he examines each of us in turn, looking at our teeth, and with that single glance diagnoses every illness known to man. Once, he looked at my teeth and declared that I was three months pregnant. The whole family went into shock, given that I am male. But since we knew my grandfather’s error rate was precisely zero, we concluded that mine was simply a rare medical case. And thank God, after three weeks of my mother putting rat poison in my eyes, the baby was successfully aborted. My grandfather has had only one misdiagnosis in his entire career, and that was when he examined my father’s brother-in-law’s teeth and declared him perfectly healthy. The poor man’s heart stopped that very same night and he died. We later discovered he hadn’t removed his false teeth during the examination, which was the sole cause of our one and only medical error.
The talent and genius of our clan is not confined to infectious disease, of course. We have treated many neurological conditions too. Take my cousin, who was born with a stammer. To treat this, the family’s medical council decided that whenever a word got stuck in his throat and he began to stutter, the nearest person should clip him round the back of the head, so the words would come tumbling out. The results were satisfying. After several months of clouts, the stammer was completely cured. He still hasn’t actually spoken, but he signals to us through gestures that the problem is fully resolved, and he has even entered several voice-over auditions. The whole family is hoping he’ll be accepted at one of them, which would shut up the neighbour who keeps insisting that the stammer was caused by our uncle pulling the boy out of his mother’s womb with a barbecue skewer.
We have also built many of the devices used in hospitals. The defibrillator, for instance, which doctors use with such airs and graces, we built ourselves with a car battery and two wires. A few months ago we finally put it to use. My aunt’s husband was attempting to swallow a peach stone whole to treat a stomach ulcer when it suddenly shot into his throat. My father arrived home just at this moment, saw the man writhing on the floor like an eel, and assumed he was having a heart attack. Without listening to a word of our shouting, he fetched the defibrillator and discharged the full current into him. True, my aunt’s husband died on the spot from acute electrocution, but we did establish that the device works.
My uncle also managed to build an endoscopy machine from two metres of hosepipe and a small camera bought from a home shopping channel. He had to buy the camera twice, as during an endoscopy on my aunt’s husband the first one came loose and lodged in his stomach, where it is still filming to this day. This is why my uncle rings their house every now and then and says: “So you had chelow kabab again and didn’t invite us.”
I would very much like to write more about our family’s medical achievements, but unfortunately my uncle is currently standing over me with a bludgeon, ready to knock me out so the family can perform its first surgery: the removal of my pancreas from my brain. The rest will have to wait until after the surgery.
