When You Can’t Even Do A Pandemic Right

Some days you just yearn for something different, something off the beaten path, a little exotic. Everyone else is following one trend but you want to stand out. I get that. 

Way back in February I was in glorious Mexico. It was sunny and hot. There was mezcal and life was good. The day after we returned I woke up and thought, seriously how can I get this stressed out so fast after vacation? I know my bag was still missing but this seemed extreme. My entire body ached. My eyebrows ached. My fingernails ached. My head was screaming. I took some Advil and Tylenol, which barely made a dent. It was too exhausting to use my eyeballs to look from side to side.

When I woke up in the same state the next morning and the morning after I began to wonder, is my apartment making me sick? It was such a dramatic difference to how I had been feeling in Mexico. I bought a big ass air purifier that looks like an oversized old school iPod shuffle. Now the downstairs denizens can go all reefer madness without my needing potato chips. 

I took muscle relaxants like they were tic tacs but they didn’t make it go away. Weeks passed and I added a delightful dry cough like a hyena fart. This was instantly a different kind of problem. This fit in with the trend of the day, that respiratory darling, Covid-19. And bing bang I was under self-isolation. No going out for groceries or seeing other humans. Quite frankly, I’m good with that. Other humans are overrated and I have a metric shittonne of projects to focus on. I spent a fair chunk of a year housebound between my two broken ankles and my more recent broken toe. I have been in training for this, like an astronaut preparing for the isolation of space. I have existing lists of groceries for friends to deliver and descriptions of the weird foods I like, “both are seaweed but arame is skinnier and flatter than hiziki.”

A week after I started, the rest of Canada joined in. Everyone sensible was social distancing, self-isolating or in self-quarantine and going a bit stir crazy, it seemed. The young and mindless frolicked on beaches or had St Patrick’s parties before coming home and killing their grandparents. 

Meanwhile my coughing kept getting worse and breathing was more difficult. I talked to my doctor who diagnosed me with bronchitis over a quick phone call. “Whatever you do, don’t go to the ER. If it gets worse, call me.” It seemed to get slightly better, then slightly worse, and then much worse over the last weekend. My heart rate would rise alarmingly if I walked up the stairs. Combing my hair was a cardio workout. By the time I reached a doctor at my clinic by phone on the Monday I couldn’t speak a sentence without stopping to take breaths and my toes were tingly. And it was off to the hospital.

I am ridiculously familiar with the local ER. I could get a frequent flier pass for all my little accidents, but this did not look like my ER. I was stopped at the door and screened and sanitized. I had brought my own mask. There were maybe 10 wooden chairs spaced around the waiting area and someone had gone wild with a roll of red tape marking all the standing and walking spaces. I had never seen it so empty of patients. 

We patiently waited on our red exes while some guy with a well honed sense of drama came in and collapsed on the floor. The screening woman, who looked like a volunteer, walked up to triage and asked, “is there a code for this?” Buddy just laid face down on the floor until the triage nurse came and got him with a wheelchair and took him straight in. I filed that tactic away for possible future use. 

I got sent to the super unlucky infections triage nurse and got to put my own damn bracelet on before going to an isolation waiting room. I was eventually brought in to what used to be the Rapid Assessment Zone or RAZ, which is now infectious human ground zero. I had to walk on the left side of the red tape with my arms crossed over my chest and not touch anything. Nurses and doctors covered head to toe were extremely kind, considering how stressful this must be for them. Info was taken and I had a chest x-ray. The doctor walking the line asked each of us in our cubbies about any existing health conditions. The other patients listed diabetes and fibromyalgia and the like. When he got to me I asked, “is unlucky a health condition?” Once the doctor heard my whole story and considered the timelines he had something surprising for me. My symptoms and timelines don’t match Covid. What they do match would be Dengue or Chikungunya. 

Betcha didn’t expect that. 

During my Mexican fiesta there was sun, surf and there were mosquitoes. I am one of those people who is irresistible to mosquitoes. They will lick the deet off my sweet succulent flesh to get a bite of me. So I came back polka dotted despite the chemical dousing, as usual, and thought nothing of it. I had no idea there was a dengue outbreak there.

So it looks like that ran its course and, because I didn’t stop and rest, it became post-virus cough syndrome. A fancy name that means you got sick and now you’re coughing and we don’t know why or how to stop it. Go the fuck to bed and drink some liquids that aren’t booze. Do not leave the house until all symptoms are gone for 24 hours.

So I went to the hospital in the midst of a Covid pandemic and came home with a probable diagnosis of Dengue. Typical.