Kevin Lafferty gets more than his share of intimate disclosures from strangers about their anatomy and bodily functions.
Graphic details and pictures arrive steadily via email, from people all over the world — a prison inmate in Florida, a social psychologist in Romania, a Californian afraid he picked up a nasty worm in Vietnam — begging for help, often after explaining that doctors will no longer listen. Do I have bugs burrowing into my brain? Insects poking around under my skin? Creatures inching through my intestines?
Lafferty has learned to open letters and packages carefully. On occasion, they contain skin or other suspect samples in alcohol-filled vials.
“Sorry to hear about your health troubles,” Lafferty wrote recently to one man who asked him to help identify a worm found wriggling in the toilet bowl. “Undercooked fish (and squid) can expose you to many different types of larval parasites that … can accidentally infect humans, sometimes making people sick.”
“The photo that you sent does not look like a tapeworm (or a parasite) to me, but it is not sufficient quality for identification,” he gently informed another, whose email included extreme close-up pictures of a white, bumpy tongue and noted that emergency hospitals keep referring the stricken man to “psychiatry.”
