Tumbu Terrifica

Ok, so maybe it's not so terrific when it's your own body the Tumbu fly larvae has invaded, but when it's in someone else and you get to help remove it, it's pretty cool! I think this may have been my best 'International Nurses' Day' ever. So this whole week has been International Nurses' Week, but Wednesday is the actual 'official' day. Earlier in the week, Alex had shown me and my roomies some red zit looking spots on his arm and one on his stomach. At first we just thought they were pimples, or bug bites. But when we looked closer, we could see a black spot in the middle of the areas, and so we jokingly said "ooh, you've got tumbu in your arm!"

Last year Becky (ward supervisor and my roomie) had a tumbu larvae in her leg, so these spots on Alex brought that back up, and he picked on her incessantly about it. Since we couldn't figure out what the spots were, we decided to try and pop them, but couldn't, and they just got a big red area around them.

After several more opinions from different people, including "infected bug bite", "hmmm, probably tropical boils", Becky started thinking it really might be Tumbu. So, lucky for us, Ginger had just received a package from home and it included some scalpels she was going to donate to the OR here. So, we got a pair of tweezers and a #15 scalpel, and Becky went to work with me and Esther observing and assisting. The first spot on his arm WAS a tumbu! We were so excited! Next spot on his arm was another Tumbu! This was getting better and better; Alex was getting a bit horrified, but he handled it well.

We decided that Alainie needed to be there for the last one - in the stomach - and we also called a few other nurse friends to come watch. So after assembling everyone, Becky went to work on the third spot. This one was much more difficult to remove because it was already starting to dig deeper in to the flesh. But after much slicing, squeezing, pinching, encouraging, sweating (Alex), a couple groans of pain (also Alex), and anticipation, we had the last larvae out! Unfortunately, the larvae died during this process, but we kept them anyway to show off to people.

In all, the whole thing took about 30 minutes (not including waiting for people to come), and six nurses - OR nurse, ward supervisor, translator coordinator, ward nurse, and two wound care nurses.

So, the moral of this story is this - Make sure someone else gets the Tumbu in them, because it's much more fun to be the remover than the removee, and don't be the Tumbu, because they die in the end.

Documentation!!

What I learned from nursing school:

if it isn't documented,

it wasn't done!