I just watched this show on Discovery called “Leeches, Maggots and Bees:The bite that cures”. They show leeches in action saving limbs from being amputated. I can handle that. But then they break into the maggot segment. They show these people with diabetes who have gang green on thier feet. These sores are HUGE. Nothing but green puss etc… Very deep into the limb. The doctors take about 150 baby maggots and put them on the wounds and put bandages over them and let the maggots clean the wounds. They take the bandages off, and sure enough, the wound looks a little better.
The point of this post though is not whether the treatments work. I beleive that they work. But its the grossest thing I have seen on TV in a long time. The image of little maggots crawling on an old ladies open sores is not pretty. I guess you have to do what you have to do, but it would be hard to let someone put maggots into my open wound. The doctors said that the maggots only eat dead or diseased flesh, but… Not me.
Here is the link to the show on discovery.com It lists the show times that are coming up. Check it out if you can handle it.
{sorry, I havent taken the time to learn how to make pretty links )
I was at the post mortem of a female murder victim recently, and the body had only been found after lying for a few days in a hot room.
The smell was bearable, but then I saw a maggot crawl out of her vagina…
Now there’s something that’ll ruin your sex life for a while!
“What are you doing down there?”
“Just checking.”
“What?!”
“Oh, nothing…”
Now there’s a mental image I could have quite happily gone my whole life without, Iguana Boy. On the up side, you’ve saved me the trouble of having to fix myself anything to eat for the rest of the day. And let me just add…EWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!
My second day working at an animal hospital, these people brought in their Golden Retreiver dog. The dog had apparently been under the porch where the garbage was, and had gotten infested with maggots. This was a living dog, mind you. They were all over his rump area, and some were crawling in and out of his rectum…I almost threw up. My co-workers took him in the back and started shaving the area, and the maggots kept getting caught in the blade! They bathed him and sprayed flea spray on him and tried to get all the maggots off…the poor dog was really good throughout all of it. And the owners ended up stiffing up for about $200.
We would occasionally get in a rabbit that lived in an outdoor hutch that had one maggot in its side. All you could see was a little hole in the skin and a lump under the hole. The my boss would put a topical anesthetic around the area, cut it open, and squeeze out a LARGE maggot about an inch long! There are others names for maggots, a warble is one of them, and a bot is another, but I can’t remember if those are the names of the stages of the maggot or different types of maggots. Makes for an unusual insult though- “You bot-face!” “You pus-sucking warble!”
I’ve personally seen a wound that was maggot-infested. I was drawing the blood of a guy at the ED where I used to work when they took off his shoes and socks. He was an old man with diabetes who had been living at home without any family to check up on him. Judging by his condition I’d say that he’d been unable to take care of himself for quite a while. Anyhow, when they took his socks off, his ankles were blackish purple and infested with maggots. There were a lot of spots where the tissue had simply died and wasn’t there any more. The open sores had maggots in them that were about 1/4" long. The weird part was that there was absolutely no smell from the sores and that they looked uninfected (no drainage/pus, inflamation, toxic striations). The doc who was treating him that night said that the maggots probably saved him from dying from sepsis. Don’t know how it all turned out, but it’s hard to believe that he kept his feet.
For those of you with strong stomaches, here’s a link to a picture of a Bot fly larva.
Some years back here at the hospital we had a farmer come in with a cut on his neck that had to be sewn up. Apparently he went back to work and the wound started swellling up but he ignored it for quite a while. When he finally came back in the doctor lanced the wound, expecting a flow of the usual pus from an abscess. Instead he got a nice flow of maggots. He brought some over to the lab and the micro people incubated them with some chopped meat medium (usually used for anaerobic bacteria) to see what kind of fly they were. (Micro people are a little odd.[sup]*[/sup])
However for the life of me I can’t remember what they turned out to be.
Whoo! Ya just haven’t lived 'til you’ve spent 20 minutes picking the maggots off of a drooling possum’s ass…
The scary thing is, this thread didn’t even gross me out anymore. I think I’ve lost what was left of my mind.
My family’s late, lamented hound dog got viciously attacked by other dogs when he was about 7. My uncle thought he was dead at first. He made it though, thanks to drugs cleverly disguised as cheeze spread, and to the infestation of maggots that cleaned out the festering wounds on his leg, rump, and abdomen, and then left once their job was done. In the space of two days his massive injuries went from angry red and sickly green to healthy pink, and visibly healing over. He also went from at death’s door, not eating, drinking, or responding, to frisky, in the matter of a week. He had permanent nerve damage in one leg, that always twitched afterwards, but otherwise he was not much the worse for wear.
Moral of the story: if heaven forbid you should ever suffer massive flesh wounds, don’t diss maggots. Maggots are your friends.
I heard of a guy that had a maggot embedded in his head. The beastie grew, and grew, and finally, (during a sporting event, no less) crawled out of his head. I’m never eating anything with rice (or guacamole, for that matter) in it ever again…
This could all be, of course, an urban legend, and I hope so, because I love guacamole.
Working animal emergency I see maggots a lot. My own cat, Hootie, was rescued from a bad owner who let her get infested with maggots (rectum and vulva). I don’t mind maggots if the are still topical or in an extremity wound. But when they are deeply embedded, or coming out of the eyes, ears, nose, mouth…ick.
we had a woman come into our emergency room a couple of weeks ago with a maggot infestation. she was morbidly obese, diabetic and mentally ill. she had refused to let anyone in her family check on her, and when they finally broke the door down, she was on the floor and had apparently been there for a while. when the ambulance brought her in, we found maggots in the open sores in the folds of her skin around her abdomen, and also crawling out of her vagina. pretty nasty. she was alive, but in shock. and again, there was no smell. which was good. i can look at just about anything, but smells really trigger my yack reflex.
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