What about the fang mark?

“BOYS LIKE TO climb ropes using their arms, but girls are better at it because they know to use their legs.”

My descent into medical folly in Brazil would never have occurred had I recalled that conventional wisdom when I needed it most.

I had rappelled 250 feet into a theater-sized cave in southwest Brazil and donned a wet suit to go snorkeling in a subterranean blue lagoon. I had been a rock climber once, but this was the first time I had ever used an ascender to hoist myself up. I was tethered to Esther during her first go at fixed-aid climbing, cheerleading for her, taking in a slant of sunlight illuminating a stalagmite on the way up. As we crawled back into the steaming jungle, I was sweating but not, I thought, completely incapacitated.

At the bar that night I caressed my aching arms and felt a hard bump between my triceps and elbow. A closer inspection revealed a fang mark -- or was that the malaria pills? It’s either tennis elbow or something bit me, I thought. My Spanish was useless to the Portuguese speaker at the farmacia.

We had no time to work out translations but reconsidered three days later when the swelling caused me to lose feeling in my hand. Antihistamines had no noticeable effect. So we threw ourselves on the mercy of the infirmary at Sao Paulo’s airport.

Language problems plagued my attempts to explain the injury, but the staff seemed to know what to do. Immediately, I got a shot in the rear. The only effect it had was to spur Esther to dial the American embassy while I dozed on the bed.

Finally another staff member in a jumpsuit appeared. Was he the doctor? Yes.

An aide for the airline translated: “We don’t know what’s wrong with you, but we think you should go to the hospital.”

Sitting in the back of an ambulance, its odd siren wailing, I watched the streets of Sao Paulo slip by. Other cars were slipping by too because nobody stops for an ambulance in Brazil. Especially not in rush hour, which it was. At last we arrived at a hospital where someone took my temperature and checked my vital signs. I had no fever, so what was wrong? I sat across the desk of a doutor, her glasses held together by tape.

Her father lived in Amazonia for decades, she said. I had a spider bite that would hurt for a while. “In Brazil, the spiders cannot kill you.” I assured her that back home they could. She smiled and wrote a prescription for five pain pills. Esther and I continued on our journey and caught the next flight to the city of Salvador.

The mystery didn’t end until I returned home. My HMO doc who moonlights for the TV show “Ultimate Fighting Championship” diagnosed a strained tendon. He suggested I rest it and use heat to heal the injury. He said the fighters he treats suffer similar injuries after climbing ropes as part of their training. “These guys for some reason want to climb ropes commando-style, but the next day they can barely move their arms.”

I was happy just to rest and heal, mostly intact except for the loss of a true story of the Brazilian jungle, gutting out the venom of a spider that I didn’t know could never kill me.