When someone says they want to see you at noon, your mind usu­ally meanders to thoughts of lunches. A salad per­haps, or maybe some pasta. And a beer. Hmmmm… lovely lovely beer.

Not Dr O’Dempsey. Nice bloke though he is, he had an ulterior motive.

You see, since New York I noticed that a mos­quito bite had been get­ting lar­ger and some­times pain­ful. It was like a stabbing feel­ing in my back that would last up fif­teen minutes. As time passed it would ooze a little blood, and the pain was get­ting sharper.

My first port of call was a local clinic (I no longer even bother try­ing to see a GP any more) where she poked around at it. This nurse how­ever, is one of the sharper bun­nies at this clinic and she did actu­ally listen to my symp­toms and take a good look. After I left she thought about it, rang the world renowned School of Trop­ical Medi­cine in Liv­er­pool, and then asked me if I could go back later in the week. It might be a lar­vae that I had.

Cool! This would make a great anecdote!

Vari­ous checks were made, vas­el­ine smeared on, and so on. But noth­ing popped out, and the doc­tor was left with just one course of action. Cut an X in my back and take a peek inside. Let me say now, that even with a little local anaes­thetic, this still hurts quite a lot. Still, after a bit of pok­ing about he found noth­ing, apo­lo­gised and patched me up. He couldn’t dig as deep as he’d have liked to as there’s a risk of get­ting too close to the lungs, and so although there’s a pos­sib­il­ity there’s some­thing in there there’s not a lot, short of gen­eral anaes­thet­ics and a sur­geon, that can be done.

If something’s in there it’ll prob­ably die now and my body will absorb it in due course. If there’s noth­ing there… well at least the pain’s stopped.

For inform­a­tion — the symp­toms that made them think it might be a bug:

Prick­ing sen­sa­tion at times.

Inflam­ma­tion and a bump, but no real sign of infec­tion such as pus.

Get­ting lar­ger over time.

And I got the bite in the Amazon.

Any­way, now I have a nice X on my back to remind me of a great hol­i­day ;o)

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