UNITED STATES—Just when I thought Lupe was calming down as her extended puppyhood rounded the corner to maturity, she surprised me. Now that shouldn’t be any surprise for a critter prolific in shenanigans and destruction of books and property. So who’s the fool here?
Yep, she pulled the wool over my eyes one more time. Over the weekend, as the blast furnace of summer keeps on chugging into the suburbs of autumn, one window was raised. The cool air kept coming in a night, that way. Sometime in the course of last week, Lupe saw fit to do a sign of the cross in the window screen with her claws. The screen is quite useless now, except as another vestige of Lupe’s erratic nature.
It lets a whole lot of banshees out of the bottle.
Let’s start with Chagas disease. It is an exotic and sociopathic disease spread by insects known popularly as “kissing bugs.” They earned the name kissing bug for a reason: people usually get bitten by these bugs mostly around the lips and eyes. Guess what? The anesthetic in the bug’s saliva prevents one from feeling they have been bitten. Here’s to cruel and devious nature, folks. The reactions run the gamut from itching (which can be pleasant in and of itself) to supersensitive welts and choking, not to mention hives.
Indeed, there is a long period of dormancy. You’re lucky there insofar as Chagas, also known as American trypanosomiasis, may not ever catch up to you before something else has. In the beginning phase, the symptoms may be mild, mimicking those of a garden variety illness: a temperature, swollen lymph nodes, or raising flesh where the “kissing bug” left its kiss.
After a couple months, the unfortunate victim graduates to the chronic stage of Chagas. There’s good news and bad news. Like Don Corleone, it is best to get the bad out of the way. The bad is these forty-five out of a hundred infected individuals develop the disease, whose complications include heart disease ten or twenty years down the road from the first infection. Which can lead to a coronary.
So, a clear majority of those infected get off Scott free. Those remaining Chagas infected have nerve damage in one out of ten cases and one of five may have an enlarged colon: after my own time in the semi-tropics of Los Angeles it occurs that this may be no laughing matter.
The four flaps of the once window screen flapping in the breeze give rise to a whole other uninvited visitor. The homely mosquito that torments my ears at night. It is messenger of the dread dengue fever.
Oh, Lupe, Lupe, Lupe—what have you done?
