My Incidents with the Malawian Animals: Part 3

Here is the last installment of my personally harrowing experiences with animals in Malawi. I have saved the most traumatic for last. After our mountains trips we took a weekend to go to a safari lodge. The thatched tents hung down to the ground and it was up to the animals and bugs to know they were not allowed to tuck under and cozy up into our beds with us. I saw a giant lizard creep in at one point.

I love animals and am fascinated by bugs, but ever since seeing the movie "Mountains of the Moon" (Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, two of history's most remarkable adventurers, set out to Africa in 1854 to find the mysterious source of the Nile River) I have thought it a terrible nightmare to have a bug in my ear. This I mentioned to Nigel the day before "the incident".

The next day I innocently walked into the shower block. There were the familiar gecko like frogs covering the walls, bugs flying around, and an open air concept. I was pulling my shirt over my head and a bug must have gotten caught between my shirt and my face. In a moment of panic he dove into my ear.

Now there are few moments where I can look back to a moment of complete lack of self-awareness where I say or do anything that comes into my head. It was only in looking back that I recalled jumping around yelling "my eardrum is going to break! Get it out!" Nigel was there and he can attest to my insanity. He immediately looked in my ear only to discover it had crawled too deep to see. He assured me my eardrum was not going to break, nor would it crawl into my head, but that the eardrum was a block it couldn't pass.

Panic beset me. A bug in the ear is the absolute loudest thing I have ever heard. It was panicking and flapping. When it flapped, I can only assume to get out, the noise vibrated in my head. The moments it stopped there was a loud rumbling or buzzing. I was less panicked during these times. I couldn't think beyond getting this thing out.

Nigel led me to the main lodge where we asked the manager if they had dealt with this before. They had not. Nigel decided the bug needed to be killed. He procured a bottle of olive oil from the kitchen and poured it down my ear. It oozed warm.

Having a bug in your ear is traumatic. Listening to a bug drown in oil in your ear is gross. I couldn't look away. I couldn't plug my ear. I sat there and listened to every last noise it made. I swear I heard some sort of crying after the movement had stopped. Nigel suggested it might have been secretions being released on death. Someone had a syringe and we tried flushing it out with water, but to no avail.

That night I slept with toilet paper stuffed in my ear. There was a constant dripping of olive oil. This wasn't so bad. Since the bug had died so had my panic. There were no more loud rustling and flapping, just the realization there was a dead bug rotting my in ear. We would have to wait until we were back in Blantyre to extract it.

By the end of the second day we were back and I began experiencing pain. My glands and sinuses hurt on the side the bug was on. Swallowing hurt. Nigel found an otoscope and peered into the depths of my ear. "It is huge! I think it is a wasp." I did not need to know that before the bug came out! It was so big it was wedged into the end of the canal. To end a long story, the bug was extracted by a ENT doctor at Queens hospital the following day in two bits...body first, wings and head second. I asked to keep it, although I only got the second bit intact.