Having cut my teeth in the Royal Army Medical Corps, I have been a doctor for getting on for forty years and there isn’t much that makes me queasy anymore, but I have to say, this bowled me for six. I now work as a GP and I was attending to a man, maybe in his thirties, who came to my minor surgery list with what looked like a particularly angry cyst on the top of his head. It was very distended and painful to the touch, so needed draining immediately. I embarked on the usual drainage procedure, but I’d only gone so far as to make a small incision when I saw something was not right. There was something moving in there, visible through the small cut. I made the cut a bit bigger, and there was a huge thorny maggot, writhing about. I grabbed a tube normally used for urine samples, flicked it in and then as quickly as possible sealed it in a specimen bag, as I knew it would need to be sent to pathology. The patient and I then proceeded to throw up simultaneously.
