Unanticipated Souvenir

In my last blog post I lamented the khaki-colored wardrobe that my travel companions in the Peruvian Amazon convinced me to don. They warned of a pesky bug, a botfly, that transmits its eggs onto mosquitoes which deposit them into your skin with an otherwise benign bite. I eventually ditched my tank top for long sleeves in order to avoid an infestation… they gave me good advice, it just came a tad too late.

I’d noticed the mosquito bite after we’d left the Amazon. It was square on my left deltoid with a particularly itchy sting. I scratched it until it bled. But then it stopped itching and scabbed over so I forgot about it.

Five days later and I was back home. Unpacked and showered, I noticed that the bite look raised, irritated, and a bit pussy. Perhaps it had been a zit all along. I squeezed and waited and squeeze again. The next day it looked swollen and oozed clear liquid — it was clearly not a zit. Days passed and it continued to swell. A friend scared me into going to the doctor by declaring that I could have an infection, and that certain kinds (like staph), could be life threatening.

I went to the doctor on a Friday, 12 days after I got home from Peru. He assured me I was not dying. He also peeled away the scab to take a look at the bite and did some prodding. He commented that it was odd that it was oozing, and yet nothing more came out when he squeezed it. Odd indeed.

That night I slathered my bite in Neosporin. Saturday morning I peeled back the band-aid just in time to see a thin, translucent worm dart back into the hole in my arm that doubled as its airway. As it turns out, gels like Vaseline and Neosporin cut off the airflow and that little bit of first-aid had forced my botfly to come to the surface–of my skin. Part of me couldn’t believe what I’d just seen but another night of Neosporin proved the botfly hypothesis.

What does one do when one discovers she’s harboring a parasite? I did the only thing I could. I covered it back up and didn’t allow myself to think about it for a single second. I knew if I allowed my mind to stray with even one larvae thought, I could very well drive myself insane, or at least into an anxiety attack.

I called the doctor the first thing Monday morning. It wasn’t infectious fluid, I told them, I was harboring a fly fetus. One that was growing larger every day. When I arrived at the doctors’ office later that morning for my extraction, Dr. Crawford’s eyes were bright. “I’ve been looking up this stuff on YouTube ever since the nurse told me,” he said.

Great.

Armed with his Internet knowledge, Dr. Crawford performed the first botfly extraction that anyone there could remember. Special thanks to the botfly support crew, writer, editor, and photographer James Dziezynsi for documenting the extraction in the name of women’s adventure.

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Jayme Otto is a travel blogger and contributing editor for Women’s Adventure and a freelancer at large. Look for her regular blogs on www.womensadventuremagazine.com.