Your honeymoon should be a vacation that evokes warm memories. However, for a 36-year-old woman from Tampa, Florida, memories of her honeymoon will likely be forever overshadowed thanks to an uninvited visitor.

According to WFLA, the woman honeymooned in Belize, a country in Central America that borders Guatemala, earlier in the year. She returned from her trip with what she suspected was a rash in her groin. However, when the lesion associated with the rash never cleared up, she decided to seek medical attention.

The Tampa Bay Times reports that the woman, who hasn’t been named, ended up at Tampa General Hospital two months after her honeymoon trip. The patient suspected she had been bitten by something, perhaps even a tick, as she had found one on her back after horseriding in Belize.

Prior to presenting at Tampa General Hospital, she had visited her local doctor who suspected an infection, As a result of this, he gave her a course of antibiotics to help clear up the lesion in her groin. When this didn’t clear up her symptoms, the woman sought another opinion at Tampa General Hospital where doctors were just as confused as to what was going on as her local doctor was.

A beach in Placencia, Belize Featured image credit: Julia_Nigh Pixabay

Considering the woman had returned from Belize with no other symptoms besides the raised lesion, doctors suspected a cyst or ingrown hair. However, exploration turned up nothing of the sort. So, in an effort to get to the bottom of the mysterious lesion, the woman was referred to a dermatologist.

The woman eventually presented at Tampa Memorial and a wound care specialist delved deeper into the mystery and had the lesion in her groin removed in order to discover what exactly it was.

And what it turned out to be was a maggot.

That’s right, the woman had managed to pick up an uninvited guest during her trip to Belize. Experts suspect the maggot is actually the larvae of a botfly, an insect common in areas in Central and South America.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 15 years here, but it is actually quite common in Central and South America,” said Dr. Enrico Camporesi, who is the wound care specialist who treated the woman. “We don’t suspect that the egg was deposited by a fly, but instead it was a mosquito that bit the human and deposited the bot-fly egg.”

The findings in relation to the woman’s experience were published in the Journal of Investigative Medicine High Impact Case Reports.