Central America Souvenirs

"Well your trip couldn't get any worse than having maggots growing in your son's skull," my cousin Marcella said to me last week. So we are leaving for our RTW trip in 4 days and I'm a little apprehensive because of our "incident" that happened after we went to Central America. Jacob came home with 2 botfly larvae growing under his skin on the top of his head. If you google "botfly", you can watch youtube videos of other travelers to Central America lucky enough to have gotten bit by a mosquito carrying the botfly eggs. Seriously, the videos are so gross, you won't believe it. My friend Sandra looked up the videos and said, "it's like a car accident, I didn't want to look, but then I had to." It gives you an idea of what I had to deal with over Memorial Day weekend.

It's a long story. After a misdiagnosis that it was an infected mosquito bite and 10 days of antibiotics that didn't work, I took Jacob back in to our pediatrician's office and saw our regular doc who properly diagnosed him with botfly larvae. He's a 35+ year veteran pediatrician and had never seen it before, (he and his associates looked it up on the web and guessed that was what it was, given that we had just come back from Central America.) Paul's aunt died that week so he had to fly out of town for the funeral, so I took Jacob to the appointment where our pediatrician cut his head open and extracted one of the larvae (it was dead), but couldn't "find" the other one. (Jacob had 2 bumps, so we figured he had 2 larvae.) The extraction of the one was not an easy feat, as we were there for an hour and 1/2 and Jacob must have gotten 15-20 novacaine? shots and I am not exaggerating. So he sent us home for the long weekend in hopes that we would extract the other one the following week. Luckily I called my friend who is an infectious diseases doctor, Dave, who researched online for me and told me what to do, and my other doctor friend, Mark, actually came to my house Saturday night to help me extract the other *live!* one out of Jacob's head in my kitchen. Basically we suffocated the thing with vaseline & by using Mark's doctor's sticky saran wrap (I forget the official name) and the grub came to the surface trying to get air and then he took it out with his fancy doctor tweezers. Crazy.

So we didn't tell the younger kids about it, so don't mention it around them if you see us. And if I seem a little apprehensive about the trip, just look up "botfly" and you'll know why.