A video posted on Instagram Wednesday appeared to show the disgusted dad attempting to pull the parasite from his 5-year-old son’s hair with a tweezer after returning home from a vacation in Africa during the summer.
“Cali had been complaining of a pain on the top of his head but it just looked like a little red bump,” the mother wrote in the caption of the video. “The next day it had a white tip like a pimple but after showing our guides and a local medic nobody knew what it could be. Randomly, I texted a photo of it to my girlfriend back home and her husband recognized it as a boy [sic] fly! A BOT FLY!!?!?!!”
View this post on Instagram
The mother wrote that her girlfriend was the one who suggested to her that the bump could be a botfly after she believed it was a pimple, which prompted her husband to wake up his son to remove the parasite. She warned that the video was “NOT for the faint of heart,” stating that it “includes worms” in the caption. (RELATED: Skin-Disfiguring Parasite Infections Rise In Southern States, CDC Warns)
“Basically, 6 days prior, a bot fly bit Cali on the head and laid its egg inside his skin. The egg then hatched and the larva continued to live in his head and would have been there for ~20 more days until it was ready to crawl out and fly away on its own!!” the mother wrote. “It was late into the night when my girlfriend notified me it may be a bot fly so I woke up Garrett and with tweezers in hand said ‘You’re not going to believe this. I think the pimple is alive and we need to operate.'”
The mom said her son hates “gross stuff” like the botfly and emphasized that the dad “went total Papa Bear mode” to remove what his son bragged to his brother was a “head monster.”
“MORAL OF THE STORY : Traveling isn’t always rainbows and butterflies. Sometimes it’s tweezers and bot flies,” the mother wrote.