My thrilling brush with death at the supermarket avocado aisle
IT wasn’t as severe as a wasp sting, but it was a sharp little nip nonetheless. I had reached for a net of avocados (I presume the Taoiseach would be impressed) and as I went to take one from the supermarket display, I felt the pinch. Quickly withdrawing my hand, I stared into the pile of fruit but the culprit wasn’t to be seen.
Still, I reckoned, slumbering as it was in a pile of avocados, whatever had bitten me probably wasn’t indigenous to south Dublin, where I was shopping. In an effort to know my enemy, I checked the country of origin of the avocados: Colombia. Oh my. What the hell had just bitten me?
Now, there were a few options available to me right there, in that popular supermarket last Friday. I could have complained, of course, but I don’t think my rogue attack was entirely the fault of the supermarket, and since it has been ignoring my complaints about the best-before dates on its halfprice Christmas turkeys – December 26!!! – for years, I wasn’t confident of either being shouldered around the supermarket or of a cash windfall.
I could have headed straight for A&E – already, the area around the base of my finger was becoming red and swollen – but given the crisis in our hospital emergency departments, I probably wouldn’t have been seen until around now. Also, since I once ended up on an operating table having surgery after damaging my hand in a previous avocado-related injury, I reckoned I probably had form.
I could have chanced the VHI Swiftcare clinic, but I suspect I am also on some sort of a watch list there, having presented twice with completely different injuries to the same toe in the space of a fortnight recently.
Besides, there was a much more interesting route available. I scratched at the offending, itchy bite just once and decided to see how the whole caper would play out.
Now, I have to be honest here: I was hoping to become one of those ‘hosts’ that you occasionally read about on the internet or hear about in the pub – one of those bitten people who end up with thousands of insect larvae under their skin which then fly out and almost blind the doctor when the unsightly blister is finally lanced.
That was kind of the dream, though I would have happily settled for some sort of tapeworm creature that would take up residence in my gut and make me lose half my body weight. I once heard about a man who, while peeing in a tropical river, became an unwitting lodging for a parasite that travelled up his urine stream and, let’s just say, caused untold damage to his nethers.
For the record, I wasn’t really interested in having one of those about my person, but that aside, I was pretty much up for anything.
WHAT is it about exotic insect bites that fascinates us so much? Why, when we go on sun holidays, do we count our mosquito bites and wear them almost like badges of honour? Once, on holidays, I got a particularly severe bite that blistered up to the size of a satisfying grape. I have more photos of that bite than I do of the holiday.
And I know it’s not just me: years ago, on The Gerry Ryan Show, we had a doctor of tropical medicine who’d drop in every so often and normal life would grind to a halt.
One time, when I was presenting, I noted that competitions to win piles of cash aside, we got more calls and texts when Dr Tropical was in than for any other item. A good sport, even he conceded that the single aspect of his work that fascinated people most was the possibility of great swarms of insects flying out at him from innocentlooking blisters.
He also, disappointingly, maintained that it had never happened to him.
He added that the vast majority of cases he treated had nothing to do with exotic insects, and involved people who ate shellfish abroad. Still, a girl can dream. As the weekend progressed, I kept an eye on my bite, which settled into a minor itch.
On Sunday, my youngest daughter closely examined it using the torch on my phone and expertly declared it ‘a small pimple’. If it was brewing up a flying insect swarm, then it would be a microscopic one.
Funnily enough, the one thing I didn’t do was google it. Until now. Apparently, there are all manner of bugs and ticks that like to hang out in Colombian avocado trees, but to my great disappointment, I couldn’t find a single report of one causing the kind of drama that I had hoped would make me go viral (in every sense). One little nugget I did learn though: if you are bitten by a tropical insect, one of the best ways to treat it is to rub an avocado on it – though unfortunately, it won’t make it swell to the size of a melon and take to the skies. And if you are in the market for a nasty nip in your fruit bowl, you’re better off reaching for bananas, which have been found to harbour everything from black widows to deadly Brazilian wandering spiders to scorpions.
On second thoughts, I think I’ll stick to avocados. When all is said and done, I’d prefer my five a day to be a little less life-threatening.