FEB 12, 2006

CATCHING A BUG

In Costa Rica, I discovered nature.  In my colostomy bag. 

But for those who wish to continue, I would like you to know at that perhaps the most startling sight I have ever seen was a live bug crawling inside a plastic bag attached to a hole in my side.  True story.  There I was, in the middle of the jungle.  (OK, at a nice eco-lodge,¹ but still, in the heart of the honest-to-God jungle, with howling monkeys and giant lizards and all kinds of animals that are cute in the zoo but a bit less so when there's not a layer of Plexiglass separating them from you.)

But first, the back story.  A couple of months earlier, I’d somehow managed to rupture my colon.  I’d had abdominal pain.  I went to the hospital, stooped over in pain, like the Hunchback of Notre Damn It Hurts.  They poked and prodded and did all manner of tests and x-rays.  My memory of the ordeal is a bit hazy, which makes me think they may have also given me some serious painkillers at some point.  The hospital was in rural Minnesota, about an hour south of the Twin Cities, so when the doctor decided that they might need to open me up to have a look-see, they had to call the surgeon on call, who happened to be the head surgeon at Hennepin County Medical Center, Minneapolis’s main hospital.  He appeared.  He poked.  He prodded.  He looked at the x-rays, which showed nothing wrong; I gather that from the expression on my face — a rictus of anguish and abject horror, I presume — he understood that something was, in fact, very wrong.  It might be, he said, appendicitis.  To check, he would have to insert a scope into my belly, to look around.  The procedure, and the resulting scars, would not be especially long or complicated. 

When I woke up, such as one can while still seriously zonked out on hospital-strength painkillers, I learned my appendix was just fine, but that there were some large holes in my midsection, the result of an internal hole, one in my colon, of which I now had several inches fewer.  I had less body but a new body part, a bag, into which my colon now flowed.

Anyway.  I thought I’d mastered the art and science and protocol and etiquette of life with a bag, and I don’t seem to recall a whole lot of trepidation as I embarked my trip to the deepest jungle.

And then, there it was.  I was cleaning the bag, as one does, obsessively.  I rinsed it out with water and then, as I was closing it back up, saw something move.  Something small, and having six legs, and looking otherworldly and intrinsically unpleasant.  It was, in the most profound sense of the word, bug-eyed.  Had I not just taken care of that particular task, it would have scared the shit out of me. 

I was a might startled.  I quickly rinsed it the hell out of there and flushed it down the toilet.  And then my mind started racing.  How did this thing, whatever it was, get in my bag?  Had it come from inside of me?  Was it some sort of parasite that lives in human gastrointestinal tract?  Had it crawled into my mouth while I slept, and pitter-pattered its little feet all the way through me?  Wasn’t that impossible, or were there crazy mutant jungle bugs that could do such things? 

I was particularly alarmed and paranoid and aware of the odd nature of, well, nature, because a day earlier, I had toured a butterfly garden, where the guide, a lanky young American with sandy hair and a maniacal glint in his eye, had told me about various parasitic insects that live in Costa Rica.  One such critter, he informed me with a sideways smile and a bit too much glee, burrows into your body and, shortly thereafter, causes assorted flu-like symptoms, which go away relatively quickly.  You think nothing of it.  Then, somehow, about twenty years later, you die in a manner very similar to a heart attack.  I don’t recall the precise details, so I don’t know if the thing somehow secretes a poison or causes a slow-forming blood clot or what, but I think that’s rather beside the point, the point here being that there is a bug that can get inside of you without your knowledge, and can then kill you twenty years later, suddenly.  If you don’t do something about it right after it first gets into your body, and odds are you won’t, you’ll never know that there’s a little time bomb ticking in your body, waiting to go off some two decades after your excursion into the jungle. 

(The same guide pointed out a terrarium holding a couple of praying mantises, specifically, one living one and one dead one.  Ms. Praying Mantis looked perfectly happy and well-fed, but Mr. Praying Mantis, as our sadistic American friend pointed out, was missing his head.  I’d long heard that the females of this species chomp off the male’s head after mating, but this was, frankly, on the list of things that I would happily have believed without first-hand verification.  Sure enough, though.  Honestly, if I were a male praying mantis, I would be perfectly content to just masturbate.)

I eventually decided, out of reason and logic and the necessity of not being completely paranoid for the remainder of the trip, that the bug had somehow crawled into the bag as I was cleaning it.  Perhaps it had jumped into the cup of water I used to flush the bag.  Maybe it was hanging out nearby and just decided that it should investigate this thing from which the sweet smell of decay emitted.  In any case, I reasoned, it was not a worm, and was not some albino, eyeless creature that one might expect it dwell in dark, damp confines.  It was a bug, the kind you might expect to see crawling around on rotting roadkill.  Therefore, it had come from the outside mere seconds before I discovered it.

Still, it was with a bit of anxiety that I cleaned the bag for the remainder of my time in Costa Rica and, for that matter, the rest of the time I had this device attached to my gut.  Luckily, though, I never did see anything else out of the ordinary in that contraption.  Once I got re-attached, all of my fears of creepy-crawly things getting into me went away.  At least, that is, for about twenty years.