How Our Fears Influence Our Reality

(Photo taken in Tarcoles, Costa Rica. There were a swarm of 30 of these guys, enough to convince any sane person to avoid switmming…) Just to be safe, before departing for Central America, I did a lot of reading. I looked at the US Government Travel website for warnings about the countries I planned to visit. I looked at the CDC website to determine whether I needed vaccinations. I joined Facebook groups for each country to ask dumb, paranoid questions about health and safety.

I had varying degrees of paranoia:

“Will the mosquitoes give me dengue fever or malaria?” I stocked up with months of malaria pills.

“What if some random monkey swings down, sits on my head, and bites or scratches me when I’m on a hanging bridge?” I couldn’t find any rabies shots, mental note – try not to pet the wildlife, damn.

Some monkeys liked hanging out with the local monkeys even though they didn’t have a rabies shot….

“What if a weird spider bites me and I have a terrible allergic reaction?” No problem, I stocked up on Epi pens and allergy medecine.

The list goes on, but the real result of all these fears was that a quarter the weight of one of my bags was the damn medication I decided to stockpile for all these diseases I worried I’d get. I brought tons of insect repellent and even got a mosquito head net! (Which I never used….)

In the end, I happily didn’t get any of these illnesses I feared. Nope, the real fun happened after a visit to Corcovado National Park.

Tapirs grazing at Corcovado National Park.

It was here, in this park, that I learned about some insect. It might have been a fly, it might have been a wasp. The important thing is, that it lays its eggs in spiders. The eggs hatch and feed on the spider, killing it from the inside out. Apparently they can also lay their eggs in humans, too. I don’t know if this is true, but I heard it from enough people that in my head (sometimes that’s where they lay their eggs) it was enough to make me freak out.

So, a few days later, when I saw what looked like a flat, green wing protruding from my leg, I knew my life was in danger. That damn insect had laid it’s larva in my fucking leg, and now one of the fucking things was eating my leg, and what if it hits a nerve, shit what if they like eat my leg, oh my gawwwwwwwwwd! Would I have to amputate the leg to survive, or would I be dead in a matter of time?….

Seriously, this is about the caliber of thoughts that were passing through my mind. Then I shut them up by deciding I was totally imagining it, and even though I couldn’t seem to wipe the thing off, I was just imagining the whole thing. At 10pm, there was nobody likely to be awake at the hotel to ask, so off to sleep I went….

When I awoke that green wing had become a blood-filled round shape. Damn, I wasn’t imagining it. Death was a real possibility. I’m in a foreign country and I’m going to die from a fucking insect? Really? Before dying, I decided to ask the hotel staff if they might know what it was….turns out they did, and it was a tick. Even the potential lyme disease seemed better than having my egg eaten from the inside and a family of winged creatures flying out.

As it turns out, there is no lyme disease in Costa Rica. Also, unlike our medical system in the US, you can just walk into a pharmacy and ask the pharmacist for help, or for a consult by a doctor on staff, which costs either nothing, or, in my case, $50. And that’s how I ended up learning about parasite medication, antibiotic cream, and even antibiotics – none of which I had brought with me. As it turns out, they have real doctors and medecine in other countries, too!

Now that I’m back I’m laughing myself silly at all the crazy fears that almost kept me from one of the most wonderful trips I’ve ever taken. Though yes, it’s better to be safe than sorry, and there may be truth to some of the warnings out there, if you’re going to let fear dominate and focus only on the potential bad stuff that might happen to you in your life, you probably won’t experience much.