Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [60]
I could tell that my mother was absolutely mortified at this weird-looking handle of flesh—although she hid it well from my dad.
“I think it looks kind of neat,” I told her later, as we left the hospital.
“You would,” she said, shaking her head.
After my dad’s “handle” stabilized, one end was detached from his abdomen and sutured onto his thigh, just above the damaged knee. An excruciatingly uncomfortable two weeks later (he had to remain with his left arm attached to his upper thigh by an eight-inch tube of flesh), the arm end of the handle was transferred to the area just below the knee.
My father never complained once during this whole painful and grueling process—one that ended a full three years after his accident with a surgery that basically fused his knee joint together. Within a month of returning home, Dad was chomping at the bit, and several months later he was back at work, driving an oil truck again.*84
Besides their ability to draw off accumulating blood at surgical reattachment or transfer sites, researchers are currently exploring the possibility that leech “saliva” contains a virtual cornucopia of pharmacologically active compounds, including antihistamines and antibiotics.
“Hirudo and some of its relatives may offer alternative treatments for ailments ranging from osteoarthritis to the circulatory problems associated with diabetes,” said Rudy Rosenberg.
The latter was a condition that Rosenberg had faced in the early 1980s after he received a call from his sister in San Diego.
“She said that one of my mother’s legs was completely discolored and that doctors wanted to amputate it immediately. She was eighty-two years old at the time.”
Rudy recounted how he instructed his sister to hold off on approving the surgery until he got there. Then he talked to his mom about an idea he had.
“I asked her if I could try to restore the circulation to her leg by using leeches. She agreed and off I went.”
Rudy plopped twelve leeches into a jar filled with distilled water, sealed it tight, and headed to the airport, having booked the first flight to San Diego.
“When I got out there I could see that her leg was in bad shape. It was nearly black, and when I tried to apply the first leech, it refused to bite.”
By now I was leaning forward, literally perched at the end of my chair.
“I abraded the skin a bit, and about fifteen minutes later the second leech finally took hold. Within ten minutes her toes started to turn pink.”
“That’s incredible,” I said.
“Yes, that’s what I thought too. I wound up treating her for three days.”
“And…?”
Rudy grinned, glancing up at the framed photo of a smiling woman seated on a chair. She could have passed for Albert Einstein’s mom. “And she lived to be ninety-seven—with both of her legs.”*85
Kitanda usicho kilala hujui kunguni wake. (You cannot know the bugs of a bed that you have not lain on.)
—Swahili proverb
There may be bugs on some of you mugs
But there ain’t no bugs on me.
—Wendell Woods Hall, “Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo”
With, ho! Such bugs and goblins in my life.
—Hamlet, act V, scene 2
7.
SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY
Louis Sorkin reached across a table stacked high with cardboard specimen boxes and glass vials of every size. There was also enough Tupperware to throw a party for the entire Upper West Side of Manhattan. He shared the combination office/lab space with another entomologist, although collaboration would have been a challenge since the men worked on opposite sides of an island of insect-related paraphernalia that had risen from the fifth floor of the American Museum of Natural History to claim the middle two-thirds of the room.
“Did you want to have a look at my bed bug colony?” Lou inquired, a few minutes after I’d arrived. He could have been asking if I wanted to see his kid’s latest school photo.
“Definitely,” I replied, leaning in from my seat as he snagged what looked to be a fist-sized canning jar before handing me the metal-covered container.
The first thing I noticed was that the bottom of the jar was padded with