Colombia: A Sting That Could Have Killed

This Noanama man is showing me around his Colombian Choco rain forest. My wife, Martha, was part of the journey, as were two of her Colombian teenager cousins, Diego and Juan Carlos. That journey would have been idyllic if at some point we had not been close to lose Martha. It was sudden and frightening.

     We were walking down barefoot the muddy ground that separated the Noanama’s big stilted hut from a canoe in which a Noanama man was waiting to pole us up the Docordo River to his family’s forest plantation when Martha cried in pain. Something had stung her lower leg. The pain was brief. But soon her skin inflated all over her body. Large blisters were quickly spreading like rain water or oil on metal, swallowing each other as they grew.  

     “I see black,” Martha suddenly complained. And having said that she started struggling desperately to breathe. It was scary and happening too fast to allow thinking. We thought we were seeing her die.

     Diego suggested we rush downriver to try to find a dispensary. But there was no time.  Somehow I thought Martha could find some relief lying down. The river was shallow and the banks too muddy. So I asked everyone to leave the canoe and laid Martha down in it. I had no idea how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but thought nothing else would save her at this point and I had to try it. However, before I could even start she breathed better. She told me she was seeing again. And her blisters left little by little, the way they had come. It seemed miraculous. And perhaps it was. We never knew what had happened to her, but figure she suffered from an allergy, perhaps to a spider sting.

     Some years earlier, in Afghanistan, I had seen a young Frenchman nearly die from an allergy to flea stings. Armies of fleas were leaving cracks in a wall of the caravanserai where we slept to feast on our blood.

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