Chief Whooping Cough and the Dewsbury and District Hospital—The Muslim Connection—NINA, No Indian Need Apply

Beds turned in the direction of Mecca? With fresh running water and halal food? It was unbelievable. A brave new age was dawning in the world of hospital care! The patient had become supreme! But that was not the way they treated Chief Whooping Cough of the Picayunes. No, sir, when he was dragged half dead into Merci Hospital and asked for his pet tarantula they said, ‘uh-uh,’ no large hairy, eight-legged insect eaters allowed. Well, no died-in-the-wool Picayune—especially a Chief—ever went to sleep without a tarantula at his side; it was a tradition dating back to the days Manduck the Magician. What kind of hospital was it that would not extend a minor courtesy to a gravely ill patient? And when the Picayune Glee Club arrived for the traditional bedside serenade the hospital had a fright. It would not be allowed. It would disturb the other patients. Tonto and Jehosaphat were told to take their oboe and their cymbal and get lost.

That’s when Chief Whooping Cough heard about the Dewsbury and District Hospital in Yorkshire, UK. Now there was a hospital that knew how to take care of its patients! It seemed almost too good to be true. But there it was in black and white and in the newspaper—and newspapers don’t lie. He read the article through three times. He especially liked the part where hospital matron Catherine Briggs said, “We always do our best to listen to our patients and are willing to adapt our nursing procedure where possible to help patients uphold their cultural beliefs.”

Wow! Cultural beliefs! Chief Whooping Cough was as cultural as a Picayune could get. He didn’t know what tribe these Muslims were from but they were getting one heck of a deal and his cultural beliefs were just as good as theirs. Maybe he didn’t know what an Imam was but an Imam couldn’t be any better than a Picayune Chief.

So he looked into the Dewsbury and District Hospital. It seems members of the Muslim tribe prayed five times a day and the nurses at Dewsbury had been ordered to turn their beds in the direction of Mecca at prayer time. Mecca? Must be somewhere near Tegucigalpa. Well, the Chief didn’t pray five times a day, only once in a while, but when he did he always faced in the direction of the setting sun. Certainly, that wouldn’t be asking too much.

Well, the more he investigated, the better it got. It seems Muslims wash before and after prayers—ten times a day! That seemed silly. How could they get dirty lying on a hospital bed all day? Maybe a colostomy, but unless they had a pet tarantula piling dead insects around them they should be able to stay relatively clean. But he liked the part about the fresh running water. That’s right—fresh running water! Muslim patients were provided with fresh running water—none of that standing water crap; no offense meant to his great friend and fellow Picayune Chief, Standing Water. But he didn’t know about all that bathing. Ten times a day! It could turn the skin to shoe leather!

So he read the article again. There was so much there. Then he noticed this: “It would be easier to create Muslim-only wards with every bed facing Mecca than to deal with this (the turning of the beds),” said an experienced nurse. Well, Chief Whooping Cough didn’t think he merited a ward all to himself—he would settle for a single room and he knew in which direction to face when the sun set. He wasn’t a dummy; he was a Picayune.

He was intrigued by the thought of halal food—not that he wanted a butcher in a bloody apron slaughtering a bull calf alongside his bed. That would be a heck of a lot worse than the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania and he would probably have to bathe at least once a day. But if the hospital could provide halal food for a Muslim it wouldn’t be too much to expect them to supply a few barrels of pemmican for a Picayune Chief. It wouldn’t have to be fresh buffalo, he would settle for salted moose or elk and if they couldn’t get any Saskatoon berries, cherries or currants would be fine. And if they played the William Tell Overture just before they turned out the lights at night he would think he was in the Happy Hunting Ground, provided, of course, he had his pet tarantula at his side.

Well, once Chief Whooping Cough made up his mind, there was no stopping him…He checked out of Merci, packed his bags, and with Tonto and Jehosaphat in tow, took off for the Dewsbury and District Hospital in the UK.

It must have been the tarantula. The first couple of nurses had scarcely laid eyes on it when they ran screaming down the corridor. So it was eating a bird! Big deal! Sure, ‘tula’ was a lot larger than the average tarantula by three or four pounds but it was a small bird and it didn’t bleed much. He didn’t know what the excitement was about. Of course, blood shows up quite well on a white uniform. They could solve that by wearing red, but he didn’t want to ask for too much right off.

Everything went well at first except that nobody had ever heard of pemmican, but the head nurse said she would check with Tariq Ramadan.

Then he was handed a Qur’an. “What’s this for?” he asked.

“You’re a Muslim, aren’t you?” said the nurse.

“No,” said Chief Whooping Cough. “I’m a Picayune.”

“ A Picayune?”

“Yes, I’m a Picayune.”

“You mean you’re not a Muslim, but you’re from India?”

“No, I’m not from India. The closest I’ve been to India is Indiana and I’m not a Muslim. I’m a Picayune. Haven’t you ever heard of the Picayunes?”

Apparently nobody had.

Chief Whooping Cough still thinks it was his pet tarantula that got him booted from Dewsbury. No hospital would deny a sick old man a bed and all the pemmican he could eat without good reason. It was probably when ‘tula ‘ got into the hamster cage. Sure, that must have been it.

As they boarded the plane for America at Heathrow Airport, Tonto sidled up to Whooping Cough. “Did you see the signs, Chief?” he whispered.

“What signs?” asked Whooping Cough.

“The ones in the lobby at the hospital,” whispered Tonto. “You couldn’t see them but they were there. They had NINA written all over them.”

Well, they all knew what NINA meant—No Indians Need Apply!

“That’s a relief,” said the Chief. “I thought it was my breath.”

Jehosapht tugged at Whooping Cough’s sleeve. “I think there is going to be trouble, Chief,” he said. “You know that Qur’an they gave you at the hospital? “Tula’ is tearing the pages out of it on the tarmac and there’s a couple of really excited bearded guys screaming Holy Hell at him.”

“Well. I hope he don’t get sick,” said Whooping Cough.

Two days later the Chief checked back into Merci Hospital. English health care wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.