My Dengue Journey

Everybody’s writing their Journey stories so here’s mine. This is the fourth time I’ve had dengue fever. According to what’s out there, there are 4 types of dengue. So I have apparently hit them all. Am I a world record or what? So unless they discover a fifth type that should mean that I am done with it and need never fear another mosquito!

Nobody writes much about what the dengue journey is like. You read about the symptoms of high fever, severe headache and backache but not much about the real, you know, experiential part of it all. Today is Day 6 of Round 4.

Headache. Oh yeah. All four times I had a headache. They say it’s often pain at the back of your eyes. Well this time it was the bones above my eyes, the bones below my eyes, the bones of my temples, the bones in front of my ears and my teeth. They hurt so bad I didn’t even notice the back of my eyes! Move your head and unnghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lower backache? Oh yeah. Not as bad as the time I had it in South America when I had to grit my teeth and stop breathing just turn to the other side. This time I could still breathe when turning but it kept me rolling back and forth ever searching for some comfortable position.

Fever? Of course, that’s why it’s called dengue fever. Highest recorded this time was only 39.8 and that’s cuz a friend persuaded me to take paracetamol whenever it got above 39 (almost 103F). The record was the second time when it hit 41 (105+F).

Stomach pain? It wasn’t so noticeable earlier, it was a vague cycling from extremely hungry to nauseous to slightly painful and back around again. Now that the fever has broken those sensations have intensified. I don’t usually vomit as long as I don’t drink too much at a time. And nothing sounds good so no danger of eating too much. Besides, you get a weird taste in your mouth and if you do eat anything with chemicals in it the flavor of the chemicals is super enhanced.

Rash? Today I do have a rash but frankly I couldn’t really have seen whether I had a faint rash before that or not because when my fever gets that high my vision gets dim. Yeah, literally like somebody dimmed all the lights, including the sun, moon and stars.

What I don’t see mentioned in the medical literature is the weird mental stuff. It’s kind of funny but when you’re in the midst of it, it is not boring. Most of the time you’re lucky and just sleep or lose consciousness but sometimes you see weird things. Like, the time when my fever was 41 (105+F) I would see lots of ugly stuff, like heaps of squirming guts, mounds of worms, disgusting nasty things. If I opened my eyes and looked at something real it helped. But in the dark of a moonless night in a remote village you don’t see anything at all even if you do open your eyes. The only thing that helped was praying and forcing yourself to think about beautiful things like flowers, butterflies, clouds, etc. This time there was none of that but my mind was like incessantly nattering away at nothing, like it was busy-busy working on some urgent problem until I finally had to forceably shut it off and think consciously about something else. Later I was reading a weird email so long I couldn’t scroll long enough to ever get to the bottom and I kept finding it embedded and looped upon itself. The person it was from would never in a million years have been so verbose about anything! Of course in reality there was no such email but hey, I was READING it! I could give you a synopsis of it! That’s the weird kind of mental stuff you don’t hear much about.

The next step is wait and see if you get any of the the hemorrhagic stuff with it. So far on this journey I have been blessed and have not had any bleeding that I ever noticed, no gum bleeding or nosebleed or even noticeable rash. May God grant that this (hopefully) last stage of this journey also be so
blessed.