Part 1 of “The Thread-Puller” — A Careiance Story Series
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The woman on the phone was very polite. Very professional. And she was about to rearrange everything I thought I knew about my own body.
“Ms. McMeekin, I’m calling from the lab regarding your blood donation. I need to ask — have you ever traveled to Central or South America?”
I had given blood at a Red Cross drive for the first time. Routine. Unremarkable. The kind of thing you do on a Tuesday and forget about by Wednesday.
Two weeks later, this phone call.
They had found markers in my blood for Chagas disease — a parasitic infection carried by a beetle found in rural Latin America. The woman explained, still very politely, that I could never give blood again.
I sat there trying to do the math. I had lived in Bolivia twenty-five years earlier. I was a young mother then, twenty-six years old with a six-year-old, a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and my fourth, only 6 months. We were missionaries, living in a country I loved but barely understood.
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One night, on a trip to a small church in the mountains, we stayed a couple of days in the home of a village pastor and his wife. One night, I was bitten on the side of my face, near my right eye — apparently, these beetles are drawn to the soft skin around the eyes. My face swelled. I didn’t seek medical care. I was busy. I was young. I was an ignorant foreigner who didn’t know enough to take a bug bite seriously.
And then I went on with my life. For twenty-five years.
I raised my children. I built businesses. I navigated marriage and divorce, and cross-continent moves. I breathed, worked, loved, fought, survived — all while something I couldn’t see and couldn’t feel lived quietly in my blood, doing whatever it was doing.
When I finally understood what Chagas could do, I did what I always do — I started pulling threads. I researched. I read medical journals. I scared myself half to death looking at photos of hearts shriveled up, looking like wrinkled raisins, reading about shortened life expectancy, and learning about the damage this parasite can do to smooth-muscled organs over decades.
A pastor friend in South America found a clinic in Brazil that treated Chagas. That clinic had a relationship with doctors at Duke University. I called Duke. I got an appointment with a tropical medicine specialist.
And then — after all the fear, all the research, all the sleepless nights — the doctor told me something I will never forget:
After twenty-five years with no sign of heart damage, my immune system had simply fought it off.
My body had been waging a war I didn’t know about. And it had won.
I walked out of Duke that day with the strangest feeling. Relief, yes. Gratitude, absolutely. But also this: a deep awareness of how much we carry without knowing. How many invisible battles do our bodies fight while we’re busy living? How something can enter us in a single night — a beetle bite near the eye of a young mother in the Bolivian mountains — and ride along silently for a quarter of a century.
I think about that often now.
Not just the parasite. But everything we carry without knowing. The beliefs installed in childhood that still influence our decisions at fifty. The grief that settled into our bones so gradually we forgot it wasn’t always there. The patterns we inherited from our mothers, who inherited them from theirs.
We carry so much. And most of it, we never chose.
The first step isn’t fixing it. The first step is finding it. Having someone help you see what’s been living in your blood — your emotional blood, your spiritual blood — shaping your choices from the inside, all this time.
That’s what I do now. Not tropical medicine. But the same kind of thread-pulling. Helping women at life’s thresholds discover what they’ve been carrying — and whether it’s still serving them, or whether their own immune system is ready to fight it off, if only someone would name what’s there.