[EDITOR’S NOTE: None of what you are about to read is intended as “fat shaming.” It is simply the retelling of a story that was communicated to me via a reliable source. Each reader is responsible for their own emotional response to the content. For my part, I’m just telling it like it is.]

When we were back in the States on this last Home Assignment, people would sometimes ask me, “So, what’s it like living in the jungle?”

Personally, I always found this to be a hard question to answer. It’s difficult for me to try to accurately relay the essence of jungle living to someone who has zero personal experience with the tropics. How might I succinctly represent such a multifaceted experience when there is so little shared foundation between myself and the listener with which to work?

Since moving back into our jungle home (a week ago), I have found myself reconsidering that question on more than a few occasions. Having my senses newly immersed in the reality of “rainforest living” has stirred up my thinking anew.

As I sit here, nearly drowning in the heat and humidity of my locale, with the promise of an infinite number of similarly oppressive days in my future, I think I have come up with a reasonable response to that particular query.

I have a friend in the States, who is an Emergency Room (ER) doctor. The last time we were together, he told me this story, which a colleague of his encountered first-hand:

A woman was brought into the ER, complaining of abdominal pains. She happened to be a very large woman. Definitely in the “grossly obese” category of humanity. In medical terms, she was “super-duper, really fat.”

Such was the degree of her physical condition, that examining her body was somewhat complicated, due to several parts of her anatomy, with the aid of gravity, having thoroughly invaded the borders of other regions. To be blunt, there was some serious fleshy overlap going on, especially in the belly department. This overlap, by the way, is known as a “panniculus.”*

I learned, in the original telling of this story, that the area underneath a panniculus is notoriously troublesome in the medical realm. Not only is it a hot, moist, dark environment – a perfect breeding ground for bacteria – in extreme cases, it can even be inaccessible to its owner (the arms are too short, and the belly is too heavy), making good hygiene impossible.

After asking some preliminary questions about the nature of the woman’s pain, the medical staff (my friend’s friend) sent her to get some X-rays done. The X-ray technician came back with the results confused and flustered.

“Um…I don’t know what’s going on…Did she, like, eat a cat or something? Because there is a cat inside of her…”

Sure enough, the X-ray showed a human skeleton, and inside of that skeleton was another, smaller, feline-esque, skeleton. The ER staff were flummoxed.

In the investigation that ensued, they hoisted up the woman’s belly and found, under the rolls of fat, a dead, decaying cat. When they relayed news of their discovery to the woman, she was distraught. Apparently, her cat had gone missing a week or two before.

All we can do is speculate, but it would seem that her cat had probably been snuggling with her as she slept, and had somehow ended up inadvertently enveloped, and killed, by her excess self.

So, there you have it. That is my answer.

What is it like living in the jungle?

It is like a furry little kitten being suffocated to death by the hot, sweaty panniculus of the world.

Also, I never want to work in an ER.

*Seriously, that is the medical term for when someone’s belly hangs way down over the rest of their body.