I wasn’t expecting to update a travel journal several weeks after returning home. After all, I’m not travelling anymore. But since a bit of the jungle hitched a ride home with me, another post seemed appropriate.
After taking it easy in Cusco for a couple of days and tending to my swollen and occasionally burning legs, it was time to head home. The trip home involved a Friday morning flight to Lima, an overnight stay there and then a Saturday flight to NYC via Miami. That’s a lot of time in transit and by Thursday night I was getting panicky. I managed to convince myself that the infection in my legs was caused by worms and dreaded the thought of possibly arriving in the States with them. After a sleepless night, not sure what to do, I called the Peruvian doctor at six in the morning. I’m sure I woke him and he agreed to come examine me again before my flight out of Cusco. I explained that I thought I saw white stuff inside the bites and he told me that to be certain, he would have to cut open the wounds, which he did with a needle. This being Peru, no anesthetic was involved and it was a bit like being tortured by a friendly, helpful psychopath. He concluded again that there were no worms and that I likely had just seen puss from the infection. Now I could look forward to the two days of air-travel with wounds that were freshly picked open. Oh, goody. I was pretty down on myself for not trusting him the first time and making the situation worse for myself.
Aside from my general discomfort, the flight to Lima and my evening stay there were uneventful. I was mostly worried about the long flights back to the United States and whether I could tolerate sitting still and having to surpress my occasional yelping for the entire flight. I hobbled through baggage claim and customs at Miami grabbing at my various stinging skin infections and then re-boarded for New York. As we landed in New York, I wished I was a kid again so that I could have parents waiting for me at the gate. Lucky me, as I limped towards baggage claim, I saw my parents who had come to surprise me by picking me up at the airport! My father carried my bags, they drove me home, waited while I showered and then we all went out for a nice meal. Apparently, when you travel to the jungle and write home about exotic bugs and jaguars, your parents are reminded that you are their baby, even if you are a thirty-two year old baby.
I spent the next couple of weeks touring several doctors’ offices while they puzzled at my predicament. At first, I still had to manually drain the wounds, applying pressure until a black-ish ooze would come out accompanied by barely tolerable burning sensations, so the first doctor prescribed another week of antibiotics. Once the infection was gone and the black ooze stopped, the bites still hadn’t closed up. Now they looked like regular little bug bites but would occasionally sting, as if I was getting jabbed with a needle, and then they would bleed profusely. I was going through about twenty band-aids a day and the jabbing sensation was pretty distracting.
Next on the tour was a stop at an infectious disease specialist. My first surprise was that the doctor with the conservative Jewish sounding name was in fact a middle aged transvestite. He was tall with a small frame, slimming clothing, large necklace, dangly earrings, nice lip gloss and perfectly plucked eye-brows. Oh, and bald. At first he came to the same conclusion as everyone else: odd but no worms. Then he decided to do a second examination and I offered to wet the wounds so that he could see the white matter that I typically saw in the bath. This lady-like bald doctor looked and squeezed and concluded, “You definitely have maggots in there!” Oh, dear. Its moments like these that make reality seem so fragile.
He excitedly called a dermatologist who agreed to see me right away. At the dermatologists’ office we discussed my options. The low tech options were likely the best. They involved smothering the worms with Vaseline or tape in order to coax them to the surface, then pulling with tweezers. (“Have you tried bacon?” asked the dermatologist. Uhm, no I hadn’t tried to smother my worms with bacon.) High tech options involved burning the skin with liquid nitrogen so that all of the surrounding skin sheds taking the worms with it. I wasn’t too happy about the burning aspect of that. Cutting the bites open didn’t seem to be a good idea because the risk of infection was high. We compromised with the doctor biopsying and stitching one site. While he sent that off to the lab, I would try the home remedies and we would meet back up in a couple of days.
Luckily for me, the following day was Wednesday, my day off from work. After twenty four hours of keeping the bites covered with tape and Vaseline, my little hitchhikers were ready to be de-boarded. By pressing down on the surrounding skin, I was able to grasp just enough of the worm with tweezers and pull it out. The first extraction was pretty horrifying. A friend of mine from Peru had heard my story and suggested that I probably had butterfly larvae, rare but small, which would explain why the doctors couldn’t easily diagnose me. So I expected to pull out something like a small piece of thread. Instead, however, I found myself pulling out botfly larvae. These are ugly, thin on the end close to the skin’s surface and thicker (about the size of a pencil eraser) on the deeper end. The thick end has rows of little black spikes that act as an anchor and create resistance while you try to remove them. Mine were about an inch long at rest but since they are worms, they stretch as you pull. The experience was much like watching Mary Poppins pull a floor lamp out of her handbag. How did that fit in there?!?
The process was pretty nerve racking because if you break them while removing them, you risk infection. I removed one easily enough but two were on my backside, nearly out of reach. Removing them required steadying myself in positions that are only expected of skilled modern dancers. A fourth one died before I could remove it. My body pushed that one out little by little for several days, the way it would heal from a splinter.
For several nights following, I had nightmares involving frantic searches for elusive tweezers and an impending sense of doom. On the bright side, I had more than one kindly friend tell me that if in the future I ever needed help pulling a worm out of my ass, they would be there for me. Aw, shucks, thanks guys! (It goes without saying, but if maggots ever burrow into your skin, I’d be happy to share my newfound expertise.)
I have now been bug-free for several weeks. On my final visit to the dermatologist’s office to get my stitches removed, the doctor’s assistant asked jokingly, ‘So when are you going back to Peru?’ My answer: “Next year hopefully!” In the meantime, I will be enjoying my bug-free legs here at home.
(I hope you enjoyed the stories...)
