How to tell if you've been studying parasitology too much

I woke up this morning feeling vaguely creepy-crawly but unable to pin down exactly why.

About 15 minutes later, it hit me: I remembered the very vivid and utterly disturbing dream I had last night.

For some reason, I had a hamster that needed to be euthanized, so I brought it to a vet's office. While I was waiting in the lobby (I'm bypassing some of the bizarre stuff related to the hamster), I mentioned that my back had been hurting lately (which it hasn't).

The vet (who happened to be my physiology / biology of disease professor) came out and said he could fix my back, he just needed to stick a needle in it. So I decided that sounded like a good plan.

I have this completely realistic memory of him injecting a bunch of lidocaine (local anesthetic) into my back (complete with the unpleasant sting), and then the totally unrealistic but still vivid memory of getting injected with so much lidocaine that it made a big bubble on my back that he had to flatten out and spread it around to the rest of my back. (Okay, local anesthetic doesn't work like that. We humans don't have that much loose skin on our backs...)

Midway through the process, I asked him what the stuff he was going to pull out with the needle would look like. (No, I didn't seem to care at all what it actually was.) He said it would look like a lot of black bubbles.

So I got jabbed with a giant needle (I'm remembering it as being like 1/4 inch wide) and the vet sucked out a bunch of, well, stuff that looked like black bubbles.

In the end, I deciphered that the black bubbles were in fact little bits and pieces of Cuterebra larvae, which are these really disgusting larvae that migrate through an animal's body and end up in the subcutaneous fat along the back, where they build a little cyst and cut a breathing hole in the skin on the animal's back and grow to about 1 1/4 inches long. (They are black and huge and gross. And it doesn't look anything like black bubbles when you try to get rid of them. It just looks like enormous black worms sitting in your skin.)

My conclusion? I've been studying parasitology plenty. Time to study neurobiology until I start having nightmares about facial paralysis and absent pupillary light reflexes...