Bites, Stings & Other Things…

This post is a bit of an aside from the main narrative of our adventure in Latin America taking a quick look at the various bites, stings and other things which have peppered our, or more specifically, my time here. Please Note: this post does not contain a lovely gallery of tropical beaches but rather pictures of me at my most hideous. You’ve been warned.

I should begin with a bit of a prelude to set the scene. On a personal level I’m both well adapted and poorly adapted to life in the tropics. I can’t stand the cold. I don’t just mean that I don’t like it but rather than I seem to be physiologically adapted to the warmer weather. I suffer terribly in the cold. For years I struggled with this and whilst I never had a diagnosis my own reading and research has led me to believe that I have something similar to Reynaud’s syndrome. On cold days I can quickly lose the circulation in my fingers and toes. It’s not a normal thing where you just get cold in your extemities: quite suddenly a number of my digits will turn completely white. Sometimes it’s 2 on one hand and 3 on another. Often it happens simply if I touch a cold surface. Having lived with this for a number of years I will make a point of wrapping up warm but it seems to have little to do with core body temperature. It’s more like there is a bad feedback loop: I touch something cold and the signal that goes around my body and brain is an amplified over-reaction to the cold. Blood supply is cut off from fingers and toes and it takes hours for it to return. In a bad year I have had chilblains on top of chilblains which leaves an excruciating burning sensation that quite honestly leaves you tempted to amputate your own toes! So it doesn’t matter how many layers I put on. That’s simply not the nature of the malady.

Conversely my body loves the heat. Even on a hot day I’m happy to work and sweat and noting makes me feel better. It feels like the right environment. So with these things in mind it would seem like a hot country is where I should be. However, there is a catch… I react extremely badly to bites and stings! The first time that this manifested was a few years back on a trip to Brazil. We had gone for a few days to the Atlantic Rainforest where we were guests of Alex Atala. On the first evening we were all sat around cooking up some food and having a few drinks. I was wearing my sandals and noticed some small flies (tiny little midge-like things) buzzing around my feet on the ground. One of our group told me that they were some kind of sand-fly and that they bite but I shrugged it off saying that they weren’t hurting at all. It seemed to be fine. The following morning my feet were a bit itchy but I thought little of it and put on my hiking boots as we were heading off into the rainforest for a hike looking at wild edibles. When we returned later that day and I removed my boots my feet were throbbing and something was obviously not quite right but still didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. In the evenings we drank a good amount and that probably helped to gloss over the issue but when we returned to the city of Sao Paolo my feet were in a bad way. It is little exaggeration to say that they had swollen to elephantine proportions! It looked as if I had stolen the feet from someone 3 times my size and for the rest of the trip I could only wear the pair of flip-flops which had fortunately been provided by the hotel in which we were staying. Coincidentally, as I write this my left foot has suffered a similar attack. Only a small attack this time but one side of that foot is swollen, the skin has turned leathery and it burns and itches constantly.

So the scenario is this: my body hates the cold and thrives in the heat but biting insects also thrive in the heat and my body reacts very badly to them. It’s like being between a rock and a hard place but in my case I’m between a hot and a hurt place.

I should mention that for the first 3 months of our time away in the tropics that I didn’t suffer a single bite. It was all going very well. At the end of our third month the rainy season started and in our final week staying in Escazu before heading off to Colombia the mosquitoes began to hatch. I’ve missed out one other important detail: I am apparently completely and utterly delicious. When the mosquitoes hatched it was Rosa and myself who got bitten the most. Both Rachael and Zia hardly get bitten at all and when they do the bite has come and gone within an hour. How ironic. Fortunately we were only a few days in Escazu and when we arrived in the relative cool of Bogota there was not a mosquito in sight. At last respite. Except after a few days I went down with a debilitating cold that left me out of action for most of a week.

Next we were off to Barichara and that’s where the adventure was going to take a slightly different direction. I’ve described before the beautiful vernacular architecture that dominates that picturesque Colombian town up in the Andes. It’s gorgeous and the open-plan design of the buildings is perfectly adapted to the climate. Perfectly adapted apart from the fact that they permit non-stop access all areas to the multitude of mosquitoes that hatch there. Once again Rosa and myself were on the menu and we were a highly desirable exotic delicacy. I decided to pursue a rather risky strategy at this point. Rather than cover up I went for getting bitten as much as the little bloodsuckers cared to try. By the second day I had 40 bites on each foot and ankle. Apparently still delicious. One small bit of good fortune was the ‘zapper’ which our neighbours had gifted us before we came away. A device with a little ceramic plate that heats up and is supposed to break down the toxins from bites and stings. I’d run out the batteries within a couple of days.

This continued for the first couple of weeks of our stay but although my feet looked pretty bad there wasn’t any extreme swelling to contend with. Every now and then I would give myself a bit of a break by wearing socks for an evening so that I didn’t end up with more bites. I’m not sure it made much difference as by that point it must have been like turning up to the restaurant and finding that all the tables were full anyway; there weren’t many un-bitten parts left to bite. In the beginning of our third week there I was about to take things up a notch. Walking with Rachael and Rosa one afternoon to go and collect Zia from school I was suddenly hit smack in the centre of the forehead by something flying along the path. As I recoiled from the initial surprise I felt a searing heat where it had struck and even as I was process that first sensation of pain the culprit was attacking my right elbow! As I clutched my face and cried out in pain I didn’t get a good look at my attacker but I did see that it was a large black wasp. I think that it was a ‘warrior wasp’. I made my way back to the house uttering foul words as I went and got to zapping my forehead (a most unpleasant experience) and then slathering the rapidly swelling sting sites with whatever soothing creams came to hand. The pain was intense. Like a match being held to my forehead, constantly. At first the swelling didn’t seem to be very serious but when I woke the following day I had a noticeably enlarged forehead. One small bonus was that it had swollen to such an extent that all of the wrinkles on my head had been nicely smoothed out. My forehead at least looked 20 years younger. Cheaper than botox. Sadly over the next couple of days the swelling would do something very odd as it slowly slid down one side of my face, each day appearing about an inch lower than the last day. Lovely. If I were pressed to try and find another positive in this unfortunate scenario then I would tentatively suggest that my response to the insects bites seemed to ease as a result of the wasp sting. But maybe they just hurt less by contrast.

The next part of our journey offered up at least a little respite. We went back to Costa Rica and when we arrived at the farm it seemed to be much less ‘bitey’. However, there was another associated injury on the way. These days there is a lot of talk about ‘trauma’; cultural trauma, intergenerational trauma, childhood trauma and so on. Sometimes this can be a bit hard to grasp but I think that I have a much more tangible example of trauma. The wasp sting to the face in Colombia had left me with trauma; I had become super-sensitive to buzzing. Any buzzing sound left me flinching and in a state of panic. At first this was an interesting phenomena to experience and observe. Then one morning the very real buzzing of a nearby wasp had me leaping up from my chair, slipping on the patio and cracking my ribs. Apparently, one trauma leads to another. Our stay at the farm was otherwise without incident until the very last few days when I acquired a trio of bites of my left leg which developed into large watery blisters. I was back on form.

With my triplet of blistered bites we went down to the coast to stay in Uvita. Partly because of my hideously swollen and tender bites and partly because I was a bit grumpy and lost I didn’t go into the sea very much for the first few days that we were there. On our final day in our first short stay we went down to the beach for a couple of hours before we were due to check out. We were supposed to leave by midday but we had negotiated staying until 2pm to allow us to check-in at our next stop. I still hadn’t entered into the water very much for no particular reason but at around 12:30 I went down for the first time to fetch Zia out of the sea so that we could head back and get packed up. I spent just a few minutes in the shallows with her before telling her that we needed to head back. I started to make my way back to the shore but just a few feet from the edge of the water I felt first something fleshy around my feet followed by a searing pain in the side of my ankle. I hopped to the shore and fell to the ground clutching my leg with blood now gushing out of a wound on my left ankle. For some reason always the left side. Blood was pulsing out. My first thought was that I must have been the victim of a sea-snake. The pain was even more intense than the wasp to the face. Zia was in a panic, understandably and Rachael went off to get help. I ended up getting carried all the way along the beach by a family who had moments before been enjoying a game of football. It transpired that I had in fact been caught by a stingray. This was without doubt the most pain I have ever felt.

After what seemed like a long time of getting embarrassing piggy-back rides along the beach we got to the main reception where I was collected by a few members of staff who then drove us along to the next station where the lifeguards work. Stingray venom is a protein which breaks down under heat and so they put my foot into a bowl of very hot water for the next half-hour. The backdrop to all of this being that we were supposed to be checking out of our accommodation! We had to call our host who very kindly came to collect us all and along the way back to their place stopped by at a pharmacy where I received an injection of painkillers in my right buttock plus a goody-bag of take-away painkillers to see me through the evening. Rachael had the unfortunate job of packing up all of our things while I sat outside in a state of agony as every 30 seconds the pain resurfaced. I mustn’t go into too many boring details but this went on for the next 8 hours or so.

I’d like to say that this was the climax of my encounters with the wide variety of toxins and venoms that the tropics has to offer. In terms of pain it was definitely the high-point. However, I’ve continued to pick up a few more since then and even as I write my left foot (always the left for some reason) is currently burning up in spite of a thick layer of sudocrem which I just applied. The stingray wound is possibly infected as is another blistered bite on my achilles plus the swollen bites which have produced my leathery semi-elephantine foot. One ‘small’ irony here is that the more significant threat comes from microscopic bacteria causing an outbreak of cellulitis rather than the bigger things that we might normally fear – sharks, crocodiles, and so on. So I’m back to the dilemma which I sketched out at the beginning: my body loves the heat but hates the bites. I love the diversity of life here in the tropics but sadly they also seem to love me, a little too much.

As our journey begins to wind down and I seem to have acted as some kind of human shield to our girls (thankfully receiving injuries which I’m glad came my way rather than theirs) we joke about what still remains on my imaginary wish list. I haven’t been stung by a scorpion, nor bitten by a spider or a snake… yet. However, we’re currently staying next to the jungle and on Friday we’re due to go zip-lining through the canopy so perhaps there is still an opportunity for a follow up post to this tale of personal misfortune – ‘A Fang in the Face’.