Flies

Yesterday, I was trapped in my bedroom with a fly.

Flies are annoying, but less so now that I'm mobile. Although honestly, I still can't move fast enough to kill a fly, and they still annoy me.

In the hospital it was worse.

This one nurse (Kimberly was her name) was complaining about one of her patients and how demanding they were. I don't remember if it was an old man or an old woman, but I'm almost sure they were elderly (most stroke patients tend to be old - I was the youngest person on the stroke unit until they gave me a roommate who was in his twenties).

Anyway, Kimberly's patient was getting on her nerves. He (or she) wanted too much from Kimberly but the final straw was when she said the patient wanted her to kill a fly for him (or her).

For a paralyzed immobile person a fly in the room is torture. Imagine being able to see a fly and not being able to do anything about it. A fly eats by vomiting acid and sucking back up whatever dissolved in the acid. Which is why when a fly lands on your bare skin you can still feel it after it flies away.

As if that wasn't disgusting enough when I was a teenager my parents bought me a book for Christmas about a cyclist who bicycled from the tip of Alaska to the tip of South America. He made it to somewhere in Brazil and had to stop because he had an infected (what he thought was a) thorn.

When he dug it out with a pocket knife, it was a maggot of some sort. A blood covered maggot.

Which is not an easy thought to forget when you can't move and there is a sinister fly on your leg, staring at you, mocking you.

FYI
While I was thinking about flies yesterday it occurred to me that in Britain they call gnats "midges," so that's why the word midget is an offensive term. And now I know...