December 8, 2009

  • My life in parasites: Scavenger hunt # 6

    My life in parasites

    or

    More than you ever wanted to know

     

    In our jungle town of Puerto Asís, where my first memories took place, many of the local kids had swollen bellies and raggedy brown hair unnaturally streaked with blond. My parents forbade us to go barefoot outside because of the danger of hookworm, which caused the problems our neighbor children experienced.

    We moved to Medellín, a mile high in the mountains, in 1967. The first week, a friend took us on a long walk to visit the house my dad had arranged to rent. My legs got to hurting so bad during that hike that I had to be carried.

    It turned out to be hookworm. I don’t know if it was the worms themselves or the anemia they caused that made my legs hurt. At the time, treatment involved a couple of weeks of evil syrup that turned your poop purple and made you feel awful. But the pain in my legs went away.

    During our 1970 furlough, we had checkups at a hospital in Chicago. I was diagnosed with whipworm. Not worth treating, they said. The treatment was more stressful than the problem.

    Ringworm became a problem for a couple of us in 1971, for some reason. I had one on my upper arm. I think my sister had it on her leg or elbow. We used some kind of ointment, and it went away.

    I awoke one morning in high school with such bad diarrhea that it had seeped into my pajamas. The doctor prescribed something, probably Metronidazole in capsules. I took it for a few days, and the problem went away, so I didn’t finish taking all the treatment. In retrospect, that was a big mistake.

    Those years, it was normal for me to experience an upset stomach and diarrhea after eating red meat. I didn’t think much of it. My senior year of high school, I would wake up in a bad mood every morning. Our dorm parents’ twelve-year-old son had a raspy changing voice, and sometimes would tap on his plate with his fork, and I would want to tear his head off. It was like having a daily hangover. I discovered that once I downed a glass of milk, I felt better. Skipping a meal was something I never did; hunger caused physical pain.

    The summer of 1979 was when I made my fabled South American journey with my buddy Scott. At Limoncocha, the jungle missionary base in Ecuador where his dad was a pilot, we were encouraged to submit a stool specimen to the clinic lab. It was extremely embarrassing, since the nurses that summer were only a couple of years older than we were and hung out with us. I was diagnosed with whipworm (which the doctor in Chicago had told us about), giardia, and amoebas.

    They dosed us up with Pantelmin (a four-day worm treatment), and ten days of Flagyl, one of the nastiest medicines in the world. Flagyl tastes about as good as earwax, and over the course of the ten days, seems to build up in your mouth, so that the taste gets worse and worse. It also causes mild nausea. I took to smoking my pipe (I was cool back then) after I took the pills, to ease my taste buds.

    We returned to the US, and I settled back into school. Over the next few months, I made a few discoveries: I could eat red meat without adverse effects. Hunger was mild discomfort, not piercing pain. Skipping a meal was no problem. It was not normal to wake up feeling crappy.

    Life without parasites was good.

    I picked up amoebas again on a Christmas visit to Colombia, but now I knew what to do: I had someone bring me a box of Flagyl from South America. (It was easy to buy drugs without a prescription down there.) Later I rediscovered Metronidazole in capsules, which was the same drug as Flagyl but it didn’t make your mouth taste of earwax, it only made you nauseous.

    In 1984, I went to Honduras as a volunteer with World Relief to work with refugees on the Mosquito Coast. I had to travel through the port of La Ceiba, where I waited three days for a small freighter to load up. During my free time, I wandered the streets and ate at interesting restaurants.

    The day the freighter was sailing, I woke up with an evil liquid spewing uncontrollably from both ends. I had to alternate sitting on and hugging the toilet. Once it was a little bit under control, I went to the drugstore and asked for something, and they gave me a pill that did no good.

    I bought a six-pack of Pepsi and a dozen bananas to eat on my trip down the coast, which would be a couple of days. The first day at sea I ate hardly anything. I did drink a Pepsi or two; it settled my stomach. I threw up once or twice, but the diarrhea wasn’t too bad. The second day I ate some of the bananas and kept them down.

    When we got to Puerto Lempira, I was feeling better. I was directed to the house of an absent missionary, where I waited for my ride to Mocorón and ate a can of Campbell’s soup from the pantry. That night I made the three-hour trip from Lempira to Mocorón standing in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser pickup, along with a group of fellow volunteers and a couple of locals. I was stunned at the spectacular view of the Milky Way, which I hadn’t seen since my childhood.

    Mocorón was a cool place. I shared a cabin on the riverbank with Dwight, the program coordinator. We used an outhouse just across the path, and carried our own toilet paper with us. The river was our bathtub. My plastic jug could be filled with tepid potable water from the dining hall. For light, we had a Coleman lantern and candles.

    A couple of months after I arrived in Mocorón, I again contracted diarrhea, so I submitted a stool sample for testing at the clinic. The verdict: giardia and ascarids (roundworm). I took a treatment of Metronidazole and of Mebendazole (same as Pantelmin) and the problem went away.

    Over the next few months in Mocorón, I went through a laundry list of tropical parasites and ailments: nasty little worms under my toenails, called niguas in Spanish, which are actually arachnid grubs; a persistent ulcer on my ankle; tinea versicolor, a skin fungus that causes discolored splotches; an ear infection; and absolutely the worst, scabies.

    The niguas were dug out with a needle by Blanca, our experienced jungle nurse, and the wound treated with a topical antibiotic. I think I used a topical antibiotic on the ulcer, too. For the ear infection, an ear-nose-throat doctor in Tegucigalpa prescribed a five-day antibiotic treatment, but when it appeared that the infection was still there, I was given a ten-day run of penicillin in Mocorón.

    The skin ailments were tough to get rid of. A doctor prescribed an oral antifungal, Griseofulvin, for the tinea versicolor, but I couldn’t see any results. I bought a paint-on treatment at a drugstore that more or less burned it away. It was a mild acid like the aspirin-based stuff you can get at Walmart for warts and bunions, and it knocked the tinea back considerably. Later on I learned that using a good strong dandruff shampoo as a lotion or body wash was as effective and much less hassle.

    I discovered the scabies when I kept waking up with itchy bites all over my body. I sprayed my bed for fleas, scattered flea powder… and the bites kept occurring. My girlfriend looked at the red lines connecting the bites and said, “You have scabies.”

    Being my girlfriend, she also contracted it, so we each had to anoint ourselves with benzyl benzoate twice a day. The lotion smelled like dirt, and to this day the thought of the aroma stirs very itchy and romantic memories of courtship.

    We got engaged April of 1985, and left Honduras at the end of July. As we traveled, we took a final treatment of Metronidazole and Mebendazole. I weighed about 160 lbs. at that point, due to recent bouts with intestinal parasites.

    After we got married, we settled in Miami. The tinea flared up again, so I took to bathing with the strongest dandruff shampoo I could find. During 1986, I seemed to develop symptoms of intestinal parasites, so I took a worm treatment just in case. We moved to Dallas in 1988, and in 1991, to Costa Rica.

    I don’t remember having any trouble in Central America in the 1990s. I do know that new two-day treatments for amoebas were released, and one-day worm treatments, but I didn’t use either.

    We moved back to Dallas in 1995. In 2001, we separated, and in 2002, divorced. I moved into a little house in Duncanville by myself with a fat orange tabby named Pumpkin. In 2004 and 2005, I had several bad infestations of fleas, which I treated by using shoulder drops on Pumpkin (the kind that are supposed to treat heartworm as well) and by flea-bombing the crawl space and the house. I quit letting Pumpkin go outside. (He hasn’t been out in the past four and a half years.) The fleas were persistent buggers; I probably bombed my house three times in a month before I got rid of them for good. Poor Pumpkin had to spend those days locked in the bathroom, which didn’t completely protect him from the fumes.

    My most recent ailments have been athlete’s foot and a toenail fungus, which the dermatologist tells me are actually the same organism. I took a three-month oral treatment last spring that was supposed to kill it off, but I don’t know if it was effective because the toenail still looks pretty much the same. No athlete’s foot in a long time, though. The doc tells me to use medicated foot powder to keep the problem away.

Comments (7)

  • now THIS is a post! =)

    i like to see it as those parasites are a testament to how much life you’ve lived.

  • Scabies, roundworms, whipworms… too bad you didn’t have Ivermectin readily available. It works for all those =)

  • I believe those little critters think that you are TASTY!
    giggling
    cm

  • Wow, you’ve had even more than I have–mostly because of your Central America years & extra South American travels.

    Do you remember the worm purges we were given a couple of times in Villa Garzon & Puerto Asis? They would give us cramps & VIOLENT diarrhea for one horribly miserable day, & then we would be OK. In Villa Garzon it was my turn to fetch the milk down the road on a purge day. On the way back I was cramping so badly that I had to sit down off the side of the road & scrunch myself up tight.

    After our time in Choco during our 2004 Colombia delegation, I came home with a couple of nastily infected wounds. The worst one was on the top of my foot. Had to take some really potent antibiotics.

    But you don’t have any allergies, right? Do you remember that research finding, that people who had contact with parasites in childhood tend to be free of allergies as adults? It’s definitely true in my case.

  • P.S. Behold the Google ads alongside this post. Heh.

  • Hahaha, my!  Why did I ask to seeeee this post?! I guess I should have guessed from the title, but still!  Nothing can prepare you for this timeline.  You lived it, yeah, but all in one spot at one time?  Yeesh.

  • @merriej - Sorry. And you didn’t even get to see the cool ads… Back to Imvu. They look like they have a skin condition, too, don’t they?

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