Our friend Anna is visiting and turns out to be an Ob-gyn resident (=much more experienced with wounds and surgery than myself). With her present, I slowly removed each stitch. After about 4 stitches, the wound seemed to open some. On the fifth, boom! Blood squirted across the room. An artery! After recovering from our shock, we tried to clamp the artery and wrapped his leg with a tourniquet. In the end, the artery was too friable, and we just re-sutured his wound as a way to tamponade the bleeding. Wodajo, the health officer/surgeon from across town, helped as usual. While we had him at our clinic, we enlisted his help with another case. A child was bitten by a baboon in the head the day before and the family was afraid to go to Jimma for surgery. The bite went through her skull and small amounts of brain tissue seemed to protrude. Thankfully, she was acting normally 24 hours later and Wodajo helped close this large wound.
Later that day, it was time to start prepping the main course for our Passover seder, which had been cuckooing all day outside our door. Andrew grabbed the chicken by its head and twirled it around several times, quickly and mercifully breaking its neck. Then we laid the dead chicken down and with a dull cleaver attempted to chop off its head. With one swing the headless chicken jumped up and ran in circles spewing blood up in the air, giving us all a fright. As blood shot in all directions for the second time that day, I couldn’t help but reflect on how bizarrely different life here can be.
Alea with a Chicken Foot
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