Free Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance by Kenneth Kamler Page B

powerless to intervene. Bodies have limits. Though the people who live in the Amazon have adapted to their surroundings, they have done so mostly on brainpower. As evolving organisms, they are still works in progress, having not yet acquired adequate physical protection against their most extreme hazards. They remain as vulnerable to snakebites in their environment as we are to automobile accidents in ours. Where one mistake can often prove fatal, survival results not from experience but from being taught, whether the lesson is how to spot a snake or how to cross a street.
    Out of the forest one day appeared an Indian who had traveled three days with his family to see me. He had a severe limp, and it had obviously been a difficult trip. He told me that his leg had gotten weak after a childhood sickness, then stopped growing. His left leg was badly atrophied and several inches shorter than his right. The foot was angled down and rigid, touching the ground only at the toes. He hadn’t been this far from his village for years, but he had come because he had heard about my surgery on Berullio’s son’s arm and thought that perhaps I could help him as well.
    With one look I knew that I could not. His childhood disease was probably polio, and his deformity, after all these years, was permanent. The best treatment would be amputation, followed by crutches and a prosthesis, but that would be absurd here. He would have to leave the Amazon. With a wife and three small children, he had obviously adapted well to his condition and had no intention of going anywhere else. There was nothing I could do for him.
    Well, almost nothing. He said his entire family was with him and asked if I would take a picture of them. A family photo. I was happy to oblige. Father and mother in back, the three children in front, all of them taking a serious Victorian pose—I used a Polaroid camera andhanded them the snapshot as it came out. Without my telling him, the father knew to hold it at the edges until it was fully developed. I got the distinct feeling that this was not the first Polaroid photo he had, nor was I the first doctor he had seen.
    My medical practice was steady, but not every problem was serious. Though all the biologists wore boots, and most of the Indians did not, we were the ones who developed foot problems. To the endless amusement of the native crew, I treated blisters and foot fungus caused by boots that couldn’t be kept dry on the inside. They teased us by pointing to their bare feet, thickly callused from a lifetime of walking in the jungle. Tenderfoots like us always considered calluses a nuisance, but here they were nothing less than an adaptation for survival.
    One member of our team made the mistake of lighting a fire under a small tree while out in the field. It smoked out some stinging caterpillars, which dropped from a low branch. One fell harmlessly in her drinking cup but a few others landed on her arm and neck. The stings themselves weren’t so bad, but now she was getting itchy. Native to the Upper Amazon Basin are iridescent caterpillars with venomous spines that can deliver fatal stab wounds, but the ones that attacked this biologist were the multicolored kind and only caused a simple irritation from the sticky hairs still adhering to her skin. The treatment was a strip of duct tape that I applied as if I were removing lint from a jacket.
    For one complaint I found it hard at first to maintain a serious medical demeanor. An expedition member came to me, pointing to his buttocks. “There’s something moving around back there,” he told me, unnerved and embarrassed. He pulled his pants down and bent over, and I undertook a flashlight search. Each buttock featured several white pimples with black plugs in the centers. And each of the black plugs was wiggling. It was an infestation of tungas, small black fleas that hang out on the ground in areas of cleared brush such as that around our latrine. When offered a target