Death of a tumbu

My more faithful readers will recall a little incident involving a writhing maggot, my left bum cheek, Vaseline experiments and a badly infected abscess, all ending rather unhappily with a scalpel incision and a Christmas holiday spent changing dressings. Well, almost a year to the day, the Christmas worm came back (or, more likely, a cousin of his).

Here is a picture of the fiend, after F. laboriously (and painfully!) squeezed it out of my right shoulder blade, where it had elected temporary residence. The Q-tip is for scale.

The procedure involved a Congolese product called Ichthammol, a sulfur-based ointment which looks and smells like tar and is meant to help draw out infections. The doctor recommended it after assuring me that I didn’t have a tumbu (also known as putzi) in my shoulder, just an infected boil (different doctor, same erroneous diagnosis as last year).

So F. innocently dabbed my shoulder with the stuff, and next thing you know there’s a little white head bobbing repulsively in and out. Clearly our little squatter did not appreciate his lair being suddenly flooded by a toxic ointment, nor his air hole being blocked. So much for ‘no tumbu’!

I would rather not recall what happened over the next fifteen minutes – a lot of Eeeweughs! from F. and Yeeowwaas! from me – but the outcome was a swift, unsympathetic eviction, followed by a quick photo session and final drowning by Johnny Walker (yes, the thing was still alive and squirming when I took the picture!).

Bon appétit!