Harpole: Treatment by witchdoctor preferable to stateside docs 

Lord knows I have tried to be a heathen for most of my life. I survived bench warrants and gunfire exchanges with my ex wife (the first wife) who was a good shot, but careless with her off-range firearms procedures and accidentally perforated my vest in four places and didn’t draw any blood. 

We were both crying. I, because I was glad to be alive,  and she was crying because the gun ran out of bullets. We both survived the event. 

I’ve been bitten by a rabid dog, spurred by an angry rooster, rolled on by a clumsy horse, bitten by a variety of reptiles, been in a war zone in a leaky boat and, due to faulty judgement in cutting a fuse, barely escaped a charge of 40 pound ditching dynamite. 

I caught what the locals in El Salvador called Blackwater fever which no caucasian ever survived, according to doctors on a British hospital ship. 

I believe the reason for that was the factor of the hurricane prevented me from being transported to the hospital till an old medicine woman in a dirty hut near a swamp treated me for a week till the storm petered out.

As the disease waxed and waned the fever and delirium would come and go so I can only remember parts and pieces of the treatment process. 

She sometimes burned sticks of wood that smelled like they had once graced the backside of a poorly designed outhouse and she forced me to drink a noxious green concoction that tasted like the runoff water from the same john that the splinters came from.

I was pretty much cured by the time those hospital quacks got a hold of me. 

Not once was I poked with needles, or subjected to tiresome paperwork in the office until I got to a proper examination room.  

That old witch doctor knew the Hippocratic and did no harm. Since I have returned to the states and civilization, I have lately been forced to rely on civilized treatments that not only involve cold examination rooms in indecent attire,  but I have been bruised, stabbed,  invaded by cameras and roto-rooters and without any improvements in my condition, despite all the inconveniences in indignities involved, not to mention the pain and stress involved in the process.

 I’ve about come to the conclusion that I’d rather still be being shot at in Central America or scrapping  with a mad dog than be at the mercy of all those machines and liver physicians I have recently encountered. 

They’re mostly just mechanics anyway. 

On my way to Belize,

Ricky Harpole