Friday Night Botflies

Well as many of you know for our honeymoon Nate and I went down to Belize, land of white sand beaches, Mayan Ruins and much much more, including the Botfly. Before we left I had been reading about the strange bugs of Belize as I am a self-proclaimed bug "hater" and wanted to know what I was in for heading to this tropical paradise. I came a cross the Botfly and it completely grossed me out. It had said something about the botfly egg attaches it self to the nose of the mosquito and when the mosquito bites someone the egg is dropped into the whole where the heat of the human body hatches it. Now the egg grows into a larvae by make a tube like air hole to the outside of the body and can live under the skin for up to 8 to 12 weeks. Completely disgusting right? I read it out to Nate and made special note to take care of my mosquito bites while down there. So towards the end of our trip I got not one but two mosquito bites that swelled quite a bit so I did what the book told me and put a thick layer of vaseline over the bites, the one my leg quickly went down and healed however the one bite on my back never really did go away. In fact when we returned to Red Deer the bite was still there and occasionally after adding more vaseline to it and recovering it with a bandage it became quite sore, sending shooting pains into my back. Well a month and a half later the bite had become quite large, I had seen 3 doctors of which the first two simply looked at it and said nothing, it should be fine, they ran some blood tests just in case but all came back normal. So last week the third doctor gave me some very strong antibiotics for bacterial infections. The bite seemed to be getting less red, so I decided to try and squeeze any fluid out.... funny thing happened. There was what looked to be some puss so I tried to wipe it away with a cotton swab, however it didn't move, it was hard. So I adjusted my pinch around the bit and squeezed a bit harder, much to my absolute surprise and disgust, a botfly larvae plopped out on to the counter. I lost it, I called Nate into the bathroom and he confirmed it looked like a larvae. It was horrific, I felt nauseated at the idea this had been living inside of me for over a month. So for the last two day's I have duct taped my bite as the lack of oxygen is supposed to kill off anything else still living in there. Hopefully I will have seen my last botfly. If you would like to see what the larvae looked like, stop now and google "botfly". I warn you it is not for the squeamish.