by S.D. Bills

Created on: April 05, 2007   Last Updated: May 02, 2007

This week I was forwarded a clip from a TLC show.

A woman came home from a trip to Costa Rica with a bump on her scalp. It was progressively getting bigger and by time she went in to a doctor, the bump was becoming painful.

The doctor shaved her head around the bump to examine more closely. In the center of the bump was hole about the size of a pin head. The bump was about the size of one of side of a golf ball. The woman didn't seem too concerned, but rather relieved that she was finally being treated for this mysterious "bump".

The narrator of this whole story became freakishly calm when he explained that a MOSQUITO had laid a fly larvae in the woman's scalp! Costa Rica flies, I guess, are supposed to be twice the size in length compared to American household flies. The larvae had grown between her skin and skullbone into a maggot!

The doctor applied petroleum jelly and bandage and said, "come back in two days." The hope was that the maggot would be suffocated and die, enabling the doctor to extract the maggot from the woman's head.

Two days later, the woman came back to the doctor. She said something like, "I could feel it moving a little, but not since yesterday." The doctor cautiously removed the bandage and with a thin pair of tweezers, reached into the pinhead hole which was now about thumb-tack head sized, and began pulling out a wormlike creature. I was astonished that she kept pulling this parasite out of this woman's head. The maggot was at least 3/4 of an inch long! Doesn't seem like much until you have one living in your scalp!

The doctor was judicious about covering the maggot with her hand so as to conceal the entity from the woman's eyes.

"Do you want to see it?" the doctor queried.

"Yeah," said the woman.

They put it in a jar and sent her home with her dead maggot.

What are mosquitoes good for? Grossing out your co-workers, friends, and family with video footage of the removal of a maggot from mosquito-induced, larvae-evolving, golf-ball sized bump on someone's scalp.

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