Childhood Body Secret: Pinworms

so i never got the dreaded lice.  i’m sure everyone can remember elementary school days where the school nurse used wooden picks to examine the heads of the children in your classroom, and every child was mortified of the possibility of having lice. 

for the longest time, though, i did have pinworms, and i never told anyone.  i treated myself for them in the way that seemed natural to me.  i wonder if it would have occured to me to tell my parents if i was not being raped by my stepfather.  also, i have these memories of my mother smelling my fingers a lot, and i always felt very self-conscious, naughty and dirty when she did this.  but to treat the pinworms, which i have come to learn are pretty much harmless, i resorted to long bathroom sessions where i would insert my finger into my anus and scoop them out until i had no more during that session.  this was a ritual that lasted for quite a while–it seemed like years, but i am not certain how long it was.  i would then wash my hands thoroughly, but apparently i kept getting more eggs in my system. 

apparently, the lifecycle of the pinworm is as follows:

The adult parasites live predominantly in the caecum. This illustration shows a transverse section of the adult parasite, in-situ in the intestine. The male and females mate, and the uteri of the females become filled with eggs. The gravid females (each containing up to 15 000 eggs) then migrate down the digestive tract to the anus. From here they make regular nocturnal migrations out of the anus, to the perianal region, where air contact stimulates them to lay their eggs, before retreating back into the rectum. Eventually the female die, their bodies disintegrating to release any remaining eggs. These eggs, which are clear and measure ~55 by 30µm, then mature to the infectious stage (containing an L1 larvae) over 4 to 6. To infect the host, typically these eggs must then be ingested, the eggs hatching in the duodenum.
The eggs themselves are sticky, and have a characteristic shape, shared with all members of the group Oxyuridea, with an asymettrical form, flattened on one side…

The larvae then undergo a series of moults, as they migrate down the digestive tract. The adult worms then mature in the caecum, before copulating to complete the cycle (typically 6 weeks). Occasionally the eggs hatch in the perianal region itself, the resulting L1 larvae being fully infective, crawling back through the anus, then migrating up the intestine to the caecum (retroinfection).

while i felt great shame and, combined with my sexual confusion, pinworms are quite common in children:

Pinworms are a type of intestinal nematode (a round worm) that live only in people. In the United States, they are the most common worm infection. ”Pinworms are quite prevalent,” says Robert Pond, M.D., physician with the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. ”Studies show that between 10 and 30 percent of children get them.”

eventually, they went away and never returned.  sometimes, i would “harvest” hundreds of them at a time, though.  i still feel dirty and ashamed of this, and would never tell this story to someone that i knew. 

~ by silvernightchild on July 19, 2007.