As of late June, more than 40,000 Bangkokians had been infected with the dengue virus. If this rate of infections continues throughout the rainy season, during which dengue is most prevalent, by year’s end, about one in every 68 Bangkok residents will have contracted the disease. While this puts the odds in favor of your walking away from the season unscathed, it still bodes ill for the 100,000-plus people who will have to suffer through the virus, and risk their lives in doing so. Everyone who walks away from dengue has a story and these are some of those stories.
As I lay sprawled out on my bed, looking straight up at the bare ceiling I began to wonder when exactly I threw my back out. I racked my brain but all I could think about was the throbbing in my skull and came to the determination that my back pain originated from something else. What time is it? I thought. I glanced over at the clock. A searing pain assaulted my eyeballs. Ok, I just won’t move my eyes. No problem. Earlier in the week I had begun to feel a bit fatigued with short periods of sharp pain streaking from my forehead to the nape of my neck. The headaches only lasted a few minutes so I thought nothing of it. When Wednesday rolled around the pain was constant. My brain and eyes felt like they were fighting to get out of the confined space of my cranium. Soon, I began to feel an inescapable heat despite blasting my air conditioner harder than a Bangkok shopping mall. After three days of fever and head pain, the aches had spread down to my back. I dragged my disoriented self out of bed with the agility of an 86-year-old and put on some pants. Time to go to the hospital. Once there, I met with the doctor and recounted my symptoms to him: fever, muscle pain, intense headaches, sore eyes.
“I think we will take blood to see if its anything serious,” the doctor said in an I-know-exactly-what’s-wrong-but-we’ll-stick-you-with-a-sharp-needle-anyway tone.
After an hour, the blood results came back and sure enough, it was dengue. The doctor informed me that there is no medication for dengue fever and that I would need to stay “a couple days” in the hospital for observation. When I asked if that was completely necessary, the doctor kindly informed me that without proper treatment, my organs could fail resulting in dengue shock syndrome and possibly death. Or, internal hemorrhaging and possibly death. I opted to stay at the hospital.
Many mothers will tell you that the key to getting healthy is rest. As the Tylenol kicked in, relieving bodily aches, I sunk into my bed, and finally was able to drift off to a deep… Oww! The nurse, in all her apathetic glory, had decided that jabbing a thermometer violently into my armpit and squeezing the dear life out of my arm with a blood pressure meter would be prudent. This continued every four hours for the duration of my stay, ensuring that the age-old remedy of rest would be ineffective.
One night turned into two, and two turned into three. The doctor refused to let me leave until I didn’t have a fever for twenty-four hours. In response, my fever decided to stubbornly hover just above 37.8 degrees, but thanks to my new best friend, paracetamol, I otherwise felt in tip-top shape. The nurse, seeing my dejected face after being told once more that I’d have to stay in my sterile living quarters another night, tried to cheer me up by showing me that there was a soccer field in sight from the window. Excitedly, I dragged my IV pole to the window. A wise businessman, recognizing that it rains daily for a third of the year, decided the soccer field should be covered to keep his business flourishing year-round. So there I sat from my angled view, watching the goalie lazily gaze at whatever may be happening beneath that roof. It was probably as much excitement as my ailing body could have taken anyway.
When the fever finally fled my body on my fifth day in the hospital, the nurses decided to rise to the challenge, informing me that from here on out, they would be checking my temperature and blood pressure every two hours. I couldn’t remember what it was like to pull an all-nighter, but the nurses seemed intent on reminding me. After a night filled with nurses sticking thermometers in various orifices of my body, the light shone through the window and I was still fever free. My moment of triumph was cut short when the smug looking hospital worker brought in my final, hardly unthawed meal and the hospital bill. Tens of thousands of baht and five days later I was dengue free, but it was only the beginning of dengue season.
Zach Spector runs TalkBangkok.com, a website that makes navigating Bangkok nice and easy. To learn more about dengue fever and how to avoid it you can read about it here.
Have you contracted Dengue Fever? Want to tell us about it? Send us an email at info@coconuts.co or create your own Coconuts Community post.
