BUGS: Stories about creepy crawlies

In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers had to deal with some minibeasts, AKA insects, and surprisingly neither of them moved or burned the whole house down to vanquish them. (Sorry, spoilers!)

Part 1: While doing field work in the Belize jungle, Rachel Mann Smith learns how to handle an Alien-style bug.

Rachel Mann Smith is a doctor, epidemiologist, poet and parent trying to make it all work in the middle of the chaos. A Californian by nature and birth, she thinks Atlanta is both too hot and too cold, but she has learned to love the fall foliage.

Part 2: A case of lice makes Rachel Mans McKenny question her competence as a mother.

Rachel Mans McKenny is a writer and mom from the Midwest. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and other outlets, and her debut novel, The Butterfly Effect, is the 2022 All- Iowa Reads selection (and is very buggy). You can find her on twitter @rmmckenny. A version of her story appeared in the Washington Post in 2020: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/09/29/head-lice-parenting/

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Rachel Mann Smith

The school bus that takes us to the jungle pulls over in the middle of nowhere and we clamor down the steps that are meant for children to a dusty road that's going to take us to the Belize Ecology Research Station.

My six compatriots line up off the bus looking smart and prepared for the six-mile hike we're about to embark on. They have athleisure wear on that's wick away, collapsible hiking sticks and sensible backpacks with hip support. I look nothing like that.

My outfit screams ‘UNPREPARED’ in all caps. It's all-cotton and kind of like loungewear and I've paired it with rubber rain boots and a suitcase that could, but probably shouldn't, be worn on my back. My stomach is in knots as I get off the bus and there's really nowhere to go but forward on this hike.

By the end, my cotton outfit is stuck to me and I'm full of chafe marks and both of my feet are creaking in some weird way from my terrible footwear choice, but I made it to this beautiful research station in the middle of nowhere, like an oasis.

It's the summer between my freshman and sophomore year in college. And fueled by some insistent but really abstract idea that I want to do something in science, I've signed up to be free undergraduate labor in a graduate student's research project around small mammal ecology in the Belize rainforest, a job I'm not qualified for at all. The other six people are also from around the University of California system.

Rachel Mann Smith shares her story with a limited audience at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in December, 2021. Photo by Rob Felt.

As we finish the hike and gather for the first time in the main building of the research station, I think we're going to start to hear about the research that we're going to be doing over the next four weeks and I'm very excited. But, instead, the graduate student who is clearly tasked with keeping us healthy and alive comes to give us a health briefing. Mostly, it serves to just scare the crap out of me because it seems that, in the competitive world of the jungle, any animal or plant that can will attack, burrow, pinch, sting you in order to stay alive for the next day.

The graduate student tells us about malaria and dengue and all the things that mosquitoes can carry that will sicken you and maybe kill you. But he says the worst thing, the thing you absolutely do not want to get is called a botfly.

A botfly, he explains, is a parasite that a mosquito will lay in your skin. And then if you do nothing, a few weeks later it'll burst out Alien style as a one-inch maggot and leave a gaping wound.

So at first I'm like, “That can't be a thing because that's disgusting,” but after I see a bunch of the dogs roaming around the research station with the big wounds in their skin, I realized that in this jungle botflies are very much a thing.

Fortunately, over the next few days I forget all about botflies because it turns out that field work in the jungle is actually really hard. I'm mostly climbing around on all fours or on my belly in my terrible cotton outfits on the muddy rainforest floor. I'm setting the small animal traps and checking the small animal traps and troubleshooting the small animal traps and doing it over and over and over again.

While I can't tell you really like what the research question is or my part in it, I realize I am learning. I'm learning that if you don't want scorpions in your boots, you need to turn them over at night to dry. I'm learning the difference between being wet from sweat on the days that it doesn't rain to being soaked to my underwear on the days that it does. I learned the very critical difference between water resistant and waterproof when I bring a city rain jacket to a jungle downpour.

And I learned that no matter how much mosquito repellent I put on, if any part of my skin is exposed to the environment, I'll be bitten. And everyone else is being bitten too and so it's really only a matter of time before someone gets a botfly. This guy, Greg, to be exact.

And I learned from Greg that you don't actually know that you have a botfly immediately. At first you just have an itchy mosquito bite. But then you have a mosquito bite that has stopped itching and is just like a little lump. And then it starts to hurt because, as the larva grows and starts to turn in your skin, it's not that comfortable. And because it's painful and Greg obviously doesn't want to have an Alien-style wound in the middle of the jungle, we decide to take care of it before he leaves.

And I learned that there's two ways to take care of a botfly in the jungle. The first is to put another piece of meat on top of the air hole and try to convince it to like come out into a more delectable piece of meat than your body. The second, which is less messy, is where you make like a poultice of tobacco and rubbing alcohol and duct tape it to your skin so that the botfly suffocates.

Greg's botfly is on his back so I have to help him put the dressing on. It's gross but it's actually also kind of fascinating. It's almost like a science experiment in our bodies inside the science experiment in the jungle. I mean, will it work? Will the botfly die? Will the air hole close up? What happens if it doesn't? How are we going to take care of this wound in the middle of the jungle?

I'm grossed out but I'm also pretty fascinated by it. And my fascination is only increased when I find an old tropical medicine textbook in the small library in the jungle research station. I spend most of my evenings learning zero about small animal ecology and learning about all the terrible things that can happen in the jungle to somebody.

I learned about leishmaniasis and schistosomiasis and liver flukes and bladder flukes and all the worms that can live in your body. There are a lot. In the end, Greg's botfly gets taken care of. I find, by the end of my trip, I can check a research ecologist off my list of career choices. But I also feel like I found out that I really appreciated that trip for understanding what can happen to a human in a place like the jungle. What it takes to survive in a place where the environment is trying to get you.

When I go home, I spend the first few days lazily itching the last of my mosquito bites and really luxuriating in the fact that I don't have to put on mosquito repellent and sunscreen every three hours, like I did in the jungle. But after a few days, I realize I have a mosquito bite that doesn't itch.

I'm 18 so I choose denial and just go about my business, pretending this isn't happening. But then I'm at my summer job and I just get bowled over by pain. It's like somebody has stuck pine cones underneath my skin and started rotating them.

I rush home and strip down to my skin, angling my body this way and that way, trying to see what I can see and I see the air hole. It looks exactly like Greg's botfly.

I tell my parents and try to o convince them to let me do the jungle method for botflies and they're like, “No, you have to go see a doctor.”

So I go see my primary care doctor and, unsurprisingly, I now know more about botflies than she does, so she decides I have to go see a specialist in infectious diseases. When I eventually see this woman, she's actually super cool and we talk for most of the visit about all the things I learned about in the jungle, tropical medicine and all the cool flukes you can get.

And in the end she tells me, “Look, you can wait until it's a little bit bigger. We'll give you some local anesthesia and we'll take it out, or you can use the jungle method.” She says my body will resorb it and though it'll never be truly gone seems kind of fitting

So I leave her office. I go buy my first package of cigarettes. Sorry, Mom. I put some alcohol and duct tape together and, when I put it on, I feel that last twist of the botfly and then I never feel it again.

The next day, I take the dressing down. My skin's all wrinkled from the wetness and discolored from the nicotine and it's over.

The air hole doesn't close up for another few weeks and for a year I have this weird lump on my stomach, but through college and medical school and residency, every so often the place where the botfly was or is or maybe will always be kind of itches or aches. Not like it did when the botfly was there but I feel like it's just the quiet whisper of my body remembering.

Thank you.

Part 2: Rachel Mans McKenny

When I was a kid, I had this impression that becoming an adult would be like turning permanently from my alter ego to my superhero self. Or like emerging from my cocoon as a butterfly. Or if I'm being more realistic about what I was like as a kid, like finding my final evolution as a Pokémon.

But what I really found out is that becoming an adult is more like the analogy of wearing a lot of hats. The problem with wearing a lot of hats is that you look stupid with more than one hat on at a time.

Rachel Mans McKenny tells her story at The Maintenance Shop in Ames, IA in October 2018. Photo by Mark Looney.

I wear a lot of hats. I have a mom hat and a wife hat and a teacher hat and one of my favorite hats that I like to wear is as a writer. And one of my favorite things to do as a writer is to do the research.

For some of the books that I've written, I've researched things like renaissance festivals and IVF and the underground tube system in London. But for my most recent project, I got to science, which is not something I get to do in my daily life. I teach rhetoric. So I got to dig into the world of insects, because my main character was an entomologist.

What I discovered is that I love the trivia of insects. I love that aphids can reproduce sexually and asexually, depending on the season of the year. I love that pupa turns slightly translucent before butterflies emerge. I was starting to really enjoy this research so much that I was feeling a lack in my daily life. I was like, oh, yeah, rhetoric. It's not the same joy as digging around in the dirt and feeling like a kid again. I was starting to feel like I'd missed my calling.

And then one of the hats that I wear every day gave me lice. I don't know if you're a parent but daycare will never call you with good news. They'll never be like, “So your child learned Mandarin today,” or, “I'm sorry to tell you that your child took their first steps all over the floor.” No. I got a call about mid-afternoon on a Friday to tell me that my darling daughter had lice so I went to pick her up.

One thing that you don't get told as a parent is that there really is no instinct as a mother. That's a lie sold you by Hallmark. It's not real. So I began what I usually do which is mothering by Google. And Google told me the first step was to buy some lice shampoo.

So I took my daughter to Walgreens and we wandered the aisles. And so began a series of new lows in my mothering life. Low number one, it took me a half an hour to find the lice shampoo because it's not with the shampoos. It's actually in the first aid section, which I had to find out by asking someone, all the while realizing that my daughter has a town of tiny living things crawling on her.

I take her home and Google very helpfully told me that shorter hair is easier to deal with for removing lice. So I figured now was a perfect time to give my daughter her first haircut. So I sat her down in the tub and the reverse bob she ended up with was completely accidental, a little bit uneven but still got compliments.

So I treated her with lice shampoo. We watched a little Daniel Tiger. I washed the sheets and I figured crisis averted. Nice job, Mom.

But I should have figured that something was wrong because, here's a fun lice fact for you, one of the first symptoms of a lice infestation is a crawling itching feeling on your scalp. And you're not making it up. So even before the week had elapsed, I began to think that something was wrong. If this were a horror movie, this is when somebody would whisper, “The lice are coming from inside the house.”

So I get a call from daycare and they say, “Yes, your daughter has lice. She still has not learned Mandarin.”

I go and pick her up and I figure, okay, now I've got to get serious. Something went wrong. So I vacuum the floors. I put all the stuffed animals in plastic bag detention. I wash the sheets. I treat my daughter. And then I figure, for safe measure, I should probably check the rest of us. And lo and behold, we had been colonized.

Here's a little something about me. I'm a very crunchy person usually. Like I'm the person who cloth diapers and I grow a lot of my own vegetables and I have a metal straw in my bag that I pull out at restaurants. I'm so obnoxious. But when you are dealing with something living on your scalp, it's like bring on the poison.

But at the time I was pregnant and so I called my OB to check that lice shampoo was okay. They were like, “Yeah, that's okay, but it's totally embarrassing.” No, they didn't say that but it felt like it.

So I treated myself and that night I began to bleed. It was almost funny in a way because my husband and I already had a babysitter lined up that night. We were going to have our first date night in months. We were going to go to a friend's birthday party and, instead, we got to go to the ER.

As I'm sitting in the ER waiting room waiting to see if our baby's okay, all of these things that I couldn't tell my friends at that party started piling up in my head. I can't tell them that I ruined my first date night in months with my husband because of lice. I can't tell them that we're dealing with lice because you don't talk about that. It's embarrassing. I couldn't tell them that I might have hurt my baby because of what? Lice shampoo. I felt like somebody that I didn't recognize, that my husband didn't recognize.

The baby was okay. Everything looked fine, but I wasn't fine. Even despite the shampoo, the lice came back the next week. And what wasn't coming back was my confidence in my ability to handle the situation.

Now, before I go any further, let me tell you that entomologists hate when you anthropomorphize insects. It's a pet peeve of theirs. But it's so hard not to when you're living with them because Mama Louse she knew exactly what she needed to do to take care of her children. She was doing great, but I had no idea how to protect my children in this very basic way and that felt like a huge failure.

I decided to do research because I felt safe with that. What I figured out doing my research is that we had what's called super lice, which are exactly like supermen except terrible and they suck your blood. What it really means is that they are immune to most lice treatments so you pretty much have to try everything.

So I upgraded our lice comb. we have the Cadillac of lice combs. I got new chemicals. I put all of the sheets in dry cleaning. I re-vacuumed. I washed all the stuffed animals and they looked pretty ragged but I did too. And for myself, since I was not going to be trusting chemicals again, I used a treatment where you use Cetaphil, the face wash, and you rub it all over your hair. Then you blow dry it and that's supposed to seal in the lice and suffocate them, which makes you feel evil but then they're lice.

Fun interesting thing about that is that it will set off your smoke alarm and your children will be sleeping. So I got to finish that whole procedure on my lawn at 10:00 at night with an extension cord, which I'm sure looked totally normal. Eventually, the lice decamped on everybody except me, because I was the super villain in their videogame or something.

So I decided to try one more treatment, and that was suggested also by Google, where you rub a bottle of olive oil over your head and then you put on a shower cap. That's supposed to also take care of them. The next morning, I woke up. I smelled like an olive garden dumpster, but I was finally not itchy.

So this whole experience has made me feel like I truly have parenting down to a science. And I am not bragging when I say that. What I am saying is that I have been through its messy experiments and that 99.9% of my co-scientists and I will not be getting a Nobel prize for our hard work.

It has also given me an appreciation for insects beyond just as pieces of trivia. Mama Louse can lay 150 eggs in her lifetime. That is impressive. Although if I could have my children on a combination of food and shelter, parenting would be a lot less impressive. Like, “Hey, kids, here's your pizza tent.”

Still, lice are powerful and I am sure that some point in the last eight minutes your head has itched. And that is the power of the mighty Mama Louse. Hats off to you, girlfriend. Thank you.