Near death #3, body horror and the saintly priest.
- Nadav JOAT Parzenchevski
- Jan 18, 2019
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 10, 2022
- The following story is super-gross. Read at your own peril.
- This story is part of a series on "fractal worthy" people who deserved to get their own Lichtenberg wood-burning, a little piece of infinity.
-I'm not exaggerating, it's really disgusting; if you're squeamish, this is your last trigger warning.
Around 2010 I watched an episode of Bones in which the entomologist Hodgins contracts a blow fly larva in his neck and decides to let it grow there, to the horror of his GF, until it matures, metamorphoses, and flies away like a Cronenberg version of Free Willy. My then GF was horrified, but I kinda got it. When I saw it I thought it was cute and creepy - which is how my next GF used to describe me. Therefore, I confidently thought "I would have done the same thing", basking in my own self-righteous superiority, soaring way above the dregs of the nature-detached humanity.
That is, until Kenya.
At Tulia Backpackers, Mombasa, I thought I had acne on my butt cheek, and I left it alone. But soon it was too painful to sit, so I decided to go full Dr. pimple on it. As I remembered from adolescence, if the zit is big enough, you need to pinch the top off, otherwise who knows where the eruption will occur. So, in front of the mirror, I clipped the top and started squeezing. Eventually, something white did start to emerge, but it didn't flow or ooze. Maybe it's too viscous? Let's just pull it out. As I pulled it out I felt it being tugged from deeper than I cared to admit, and between my fingers I found an eight millimeter long, live and wriggling larva.
Anyone who knows me will attest that I'm not squeamish and have a high threshold tolerance and even affection for creepy-crawlies of any kind. But that abomination freaked me the F out. Not only that, now I had to come to terms with the notion that I still have two more of them in my butt cheek. Call them Mango flies, Putzi flies or locally - Jiggers, these heinous fiends leave their eggs on vegetation, mostly around water sources (or on drying clothes), waiting to cling to a passing mammal, and once the eggs sense warm flesh, they latch on, burrow in, fortify, numb the area and feast on your flesh without even a by-your-leave. The only reason I felt them was because I was sitting on them. Indeed, many Africans lose eyes to Jiggers. Evidently, I contracted them because while skinny dipping in a bioluminescent plankton-filled tidal creek, I laid my boxers on a nearby tree. At the advice of Jinu Kim, I rushed myself to the hospital to remove them professionally, but it was already closed for the night.
That's when I discovered that not only am I not Hodgins, and I wouldn't Free Willy them, I'm not even willing to spend one F-ing night with those Lovecraftian horrors violating the sanctity of my body. I gave the next larva the same treatment, but the third one was too small. After fiddling around with it I drank myself to sleep and come morning, dragged my hungover, wretched, violated self to the infirmary, where the doctor and the nurse had a good laugh at my expense whilst de-larvaing my butt with sharp objects.
Enough, right? It's a good end for the story. It's a good enough travel story to boast of around the campfire, and I feel I earned the right to do so. But life in Joatland doesn't work that way.
A few months later, after New Year's eve in Jinja, Uganda, with The Nitty Gritty Nomads, we met Berthus goes to Africa, who invited us to the Hairy Lemon, an island resort on the Nile, detached from more or less everything except for the Nile biome.
On the last day, before handing the Nitty Gritty Nomads their goodbye presents and while cooking Shakshuka for them I felt harpoon-like bites on my back. I was disturbed, since that area is prone to tsetse flies that carry the sleeping sickness, and I had just worn my black shirt which attracts them. So, after goodbyes and a few tears I went back to Jinja to complete the one art piece I've (still) never finished. Maybe one day I'll be brave enough to write about that. I started feeling quite ill pretty quickly and by the time I found a clean hospital, I had all the symptoms I'd read about sleeping sickness. After a short inspection the doctor announced cheerfully that I can relax, it's not tsetse fly, and I don't have the sleeping sickness.
It's the Jiggers.
He was so proud, telling me that Jiggers was the last question in his medical school exam, he didn't even notice I was silently weeping.
Apparently, my wet shirt fell while drying, and some kind soul who'll be reincarnated into a butt larva if there's any justice, picked it up from the riverside vegetation and put it back on the rope. Thanks. This time, it was 15 of the bastards, and inaccessibly planted all over my back. So what to do? He told me I'd have to wait until they grow large enough to be pulled out. Nope. I'm not opening a backpackers lodge on my back. So I asked him if maybe Ivermectin could help, since I remembered using it against Park Worm parasites on the dogs at the shelter. He looked it up and said yes. I asked him if I should take antibiotics to avoid a secondary infection. He said it was a good idea. So I did exactly that and went to Rwanda to look for a less inept doctor.
Logistically, Rwanda is doing ever so much better than all of it's neighbors, but it's still Africa. Apparently, there's one dermatologist in the capital, Kigali, and she was on leave. Great. My Visa was already expiring, so I went to look for another hospital in Giseni, where I wanted to cross the border to Congo before becoming an illegal alien (again), and that's when I hit the wall. Ever since contracting the flies almost a month earlier, I'd been taking Augmentin 875g daily. There are worse things to do, but it's not good for your constitution. All that time I'd been declining. More shivers, random temperature spikes, exhaustion, and a general unwillingness to live. When I reached Centre d'Accueil Saint Francois Xavier (for the gifted) or C.A.S.F.X. for short - a convent run hostel in Giseni - I started crashing. The last shred of energy I had, I'd spent on a walk to the hospital and then right back to C.A.S.F.X. because - holly staff infection, batman - I'm not getting treated there. It was just like all the horror stories I've heard about hospitals in India.
So I noped the heck back, crawled back into my room and kept on taking Augmentin for a few days, but by now I was averaging 39 °Celsius (85 Decibels in Fahrenheit) with the occasional 40 °C (500 Volts) and the nuns noticed my dramatic decline. They called Father Emanuel, who came to my room with an impeccable, confident, unassuming, soft-spoken bed-side manner and offered to drive me to the hospital. I explained my reservations about the hospital to him, but he quickly explained to me that he'll take me to a private, clean hospital that's not on the map. True to his word, the good Father drove me there accompanied by one of the young nuns; and true again, the place was clean and hospitally, with actual computers and whatnot. My blood test showed a major secondary bacterial infection due to my self-medication. I had the right idea, but the wrong antibiotics. The idea was that once the flesh-gobbling nightmares are dead due to the Ivermictin, my body will start consuming them, including Bog knows what's living inside them. It's like Inception, but with parasites. Parasiteception.
I initially chose Augmentin because it's broad-spectrum and takes care of most things. As it turns out, just not those specific bacteria. The doctor prescribed the right antibiotic, and after a quick consultation with a family doctor back home, I hopped off the Augmentin and onto respective Penicillin and Azithromycin trains. Naively, I thought the worst was behind me.
Boy, did I learn to fear Azithromycin. Every single time I had to work myself up to take that ungodly substance. It's effectiveness should be measured on the Richter Scale. Every time I'd take it, I'd go from 38/39 °Celsius (5 Kiloton) to 40/41 °C (I don't know °Fahrenheit, do your own math, 'Murica), and that whilst popping Ibuprofen like Tic-Tacs. For almost a week I went to bed on a nest of towels with 4 litres (53 nautical yards) of water at my side, only to find myself come morning dehydrated on top of soaked towels next to a bunch of empty bottles. During the night, I'd wake up repeatedly with tingling inside my skull, and when I moved my head about my vision of the world would follow in delay. Every time that happened I would dunk my head in a bucket of water, rip all my clothes off and open the window before crashing again to a fitful sleep, just to wake up some time later, shivering and freezing.
But eventually, this too passed, and though full recovery took months, a few days later I was in Congo, climbing live volcanoes and hanging out with real-life Mountain Gorillas in their natural environment, the majestic, humbling and inspiring Virunga mountain range. My visa had expired two days earlier but the locals didn't make a fuss about it and solicited no bribes. Rwanda Forever.
On the way back from Congo to to Kigali, where I would catch a flight to Johannesburg, I stayed one last night at C.A.S.F.X. and gave a little piece of art to Father Emanuel. I wanted to ask him where this unmapped hospital is, but I forgot.
Another thing that everyone who knows me will attest to is my militant atheism and my disdain of organized religion. They would be flabbergasted at my insistence on referring to him by his priestly status, but while sitting writing this down I noticed I could for the life of me not refer to him otherwise. Every interaction I'd had with Father Emanuel (not least of which is saving my life) proved to me that he embodies all that every religion aspires to be.
You see, I wanted to add the hospital location to "Mzungu", the African segment of an Israeli information-sharing network. It saved my backside more than once and I wanted to give back. So on the bus to the airport I used the name on the hospital receipt to look for it's location. There was no such hospital in Rwanda, but there was one on the border between Rwanda and Congo. On the Congo side.
If anyone deserves a small piece of infinity - it's you. Thank you, Father Emanuel.
© Copyright Nadav Parzanchevski 2019
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