Maggots in the kitchen, worms under the skin

IF YOU’RE squeamish, this week’s column isn’t for you.

Strap yourself in because it’s about to get messy.

Worms, unless they’re on the end of a fishing hook or in the composting bucket, have no place in the home or human body.

We had a rat problem.

It’s not uncommon and something everyone experiences at some point.

Our rats were finding their way in through Mission Impossible stunts.

I quite expected to find one dangling from the roof while being lowered down by his comrades.

At first, we put out non-lethal wire cage traps.

We don’t like seeing animals hurt, even rats.

Okay, I say ‘we’ but it’s really just me the city girl who feels that way.

My farm boy husband has no qualms squishing a rat’s head in a lethal trap.

He got his way when, despite catching some in the traps, we were still finding traces of them.

Now he had permission to kill, he bought quick kill traps and toxic bait that attracts the rat, it dies after crawling back to wherever it came from. (The bait doesn’t kill other animals or birds unless they eat bucket loads of them.)

The bait worked and activity stopped.

In the past week or two we’ve smelled something funky.

It was that dead smell that’s unmistakable.

It was coming from the kitchen, so we cleaned everything out and looked everywhere to see where it was coming from.

Hot days and it got worse.

I’d be standing by the stove cooking and it was so strong I felt like throwing up.

Last night, my husband was doing the dishes [he’s good that way] when he heard a noise behind him.

He turned around and thousands of maggots were tumbling from the extractor fan above the stove.

The source of the stink was a rat that’d climbed in between the fan and light, then died.

You couldn’t see it if you didn’t know it was there.

Hubby got tools and unscrewed a section, the half-eaten carcass was heaving with maggots and stuck firmly between two panels.

He had to force his hand inside and pull-out pieces of it.

The good thing is I was already in bed and fast asleep.

I missed all the action and woke up to a clean kitchen.

Another place worms don’t belong is inside the human body.

When I was in my 20’s, I lived in a town called Tzaneen.

It’s a farming community near the Zimbabwe border.

My son was four-years-old and red boils appeared in his ear and on his arms and legs.

I was new to the area as was the doctor I took him to.

He thought it was spider bites that’d become infected and prescribed a course of antibiotics.

A day or two later the boils had not gone down and there was a black dot on the top of them.

One inside his ear was really big and I was worried it’d burst and infect his ear.

Holding him down, I squeezed the lump really hard and a long, big worm came sliding out.

Now I knew what it was.

Bot fly larvae are laid on washing hung outside and transferred through contact.

Apparently, I was the only person in the town that hung washing on the line, everyone else either tumble dried or did something to kill the larvae.

I researched how to get the worms out.

The worms burrow their way into the body and once under the skin, feed on their host.

They have claws that are fishhook shaped and it’s hard to pull them out.

The black dot I’d noticed on my son’s lumps was the hole and how the worm breathes.

I put nail polish over the lumps.

With each coat the worm blew it off until I’d applied enough to knock it out.

Then came pulling worms out and putting disinfectant on the cavities that were left.

While my husband has a good war story for his maggot nightmare, I think mine trumps all.

I’d rather see maggots in a rat than crawling out of my child’s skin.