Pulling aside the velvet curtain dividing the shop, I took the man into the back. Considering this guy’s great girth I couldn’t believe that he really had tuberculosis. As I examined him I asked him general questions. He lived in a village some way from the center. He was a shepherd. Which means he must have spent years wandering about in the mountains. Why would he have tuberculosis?

“How is your appetite?”

“Fine. I’ll eat anything!”

“Do you sweat at night?”

“Oh no.”

“Have you lost any weight recently?”

“Nope …”

I stopped the examination. Stood across from him. We looked at one another. He speaks to me with this wholesome know-it-all air about it:

“But there’s no need for you to examine me, doc. I have tuberculosis. I’m telling you that I am spitting out blood! Spitting out blood!”

Ah, of course. I realize I have skipped over the very thing I should have done first.

“Open your mouth then and let me have a look.”

Using a tongue suppressor I had a good look at his mouth and down his throat. And when I asked him to open wide I spied something moving at the edge of his windpipe! And sure enough it was a slug that had set up camp at the top of his throat, moving back and forth. Out roaming the steppes he must have picked it up when he pressed his mouth against the pipe of any one of those fountains along the roadside and the creature was washed down with the water and got stuck in his throat. Sucking from that spot, it blossomed and grew. And every time the poor man tried to clear his throat he caused the area to bleed. The blood he was spitting out was in fact blood sucked out by that slug.

I wasn’t ready to pay any attention to my teacher who had once told us not to try and scrape out a slug because it would just break in two. “Best is to have the patient gargle with salt,” he said. Now I was excited by the thought of pulling that pulsating slug out of his throat with a pair of forceps.

“Serkan, now you hold the light for me right here. And try not to gag. Breathe slowly and keep your mouth open.”

He did exactly as I told him and five minutes later I was standing there with a fairly long slug, which I had managed pull out in one piece, pinched at the end of my forceps.

“Take a look … This is it … You don’t have anything like tuberculosis.”

I drop the slug in the palm of his hand and together we draw back the curtain and step out. This strange look in his eye won’t go away.

“Mother of God … So that was it!”