When I say luxury, I of course mean horrible and terrifying experience.

Now, to be fair, the bumps (as I have been affectionately referring to them) were on my upper thigh, more like. But high enough up there to hurt like hell if I sat or laid down on my side in a particular way. And you know what? I like to lie on my left side when I sleep. So that sucked.

But let’s back up a little.

A week and a half ago, I noticed some curious bumps forming. They itched at first, so I thought, “Oh, mosquito bites, okay whatever.” Weird place for mosquito bites, but I let them go out of my mind until two days later, when they hurt something fierce and looked like giant blackheads. “Staph infection?” I thought, hoping it wouldn’t be that but at the same time hoping it was something that I could at least identify. After a day spent out on an excursion, I asked Mohammed if I could visit the doctor or the hospital to have my bumps checked out. He wanted me to try to put some vaseline and Neosporin on them for a few days first to see if that helped them out, but after letting Holly inspect them, we convinced him that no, I should probably just go to the hospital. The last thing we needed was for this to actually be a staph infection and to let it get worse.

The hospital visit was uneventful, nothing too special. I explained to the doctor my symptoms, when the bumps appeared, and then Holly popped into the room to help me out with explaining. She finally told the doctor, “Okay, yeah, you’re going to have to actually look at these.” Is it a good sign when the doctor looks terrified when the patient has to pull down her pants in order to get some mysterious bumps actually looked at? No, sir, you should not look terrified, this is part of your job. He told me, then, that he thought they could be bug bites, asking me if I had any idea what bugs could have caused it. No idea, I told him, I didn’t know of any bugs that would have bitten me on my upper thigh. Though he insisted that it was probably bug bites, he prescribed me Cipro, because Holly conveniently had some she said I could take.

In the car on the way home, Mohammed too decides to let me know that it could be bug bites—mango fly, to be specific, giving me the details on what the infection should look like and what you do to suffocate the little suckers. “Nah,” I thought, “I don’t think it’s bugs, I really hope it’s not bugs…” But at home, I grabbed my computer, read up a little bit on mango flies, and decided that along with the Cipro, maybe I should vaseline up the bumps just in case they happened to be housing some gross little mango flies.

Fast forward to a few days later. Wake up in the morning, check up on the bumps, which seem to be oozing pus. Um, ew much? But when I went to wipe away the pus, it didn’t turn out to be pus. Instead, I pulled out some larvae from three of the four bumps. The fourth one, which showed up a day later than the others, got a few extra days of heavy vaselining and Neosporining before finally admitting defeat. Staph infection? Not so much. Bugs residing in my body for a few days? Ew. Ew ew ew ew ew.

I have to say, the doctor probably knew that those bumps were mango fly infections. Why didn’t he say something more specific than, “Could be bug bites”? Sure, I came in thinking that they were staph infections and said as such, but you, sir, have probably seen mango fly infections plenty of times before. I really think you should have said something.

But as of this writing, the bumps are healing, and my body is no longer home to any larvae. I’m not entirely sure where the mango flies even came from, but I’m thinking it was my bathing suit, which went straight into the laundry bag this week. So, moral of the story: thoroughly clean your bathing suit and, in fact, all of your clothes, because you never know when they may just infect you with some nasty parasites that hurt like hell and can probably do some nasty stuff to you.