A Febre Dengue

Last week I had Dengue fever.

My mother’s reaction when I said I was with Dengue fever was more or less as if I were one step away from death. When there are some rare outbreaks of the disease in Buenos-Aires, the symptoms are described on TV and the radio, people who think they are sick are urged to go to the hospital where they are treated on quarantine. Here in the state of Rondônia, where the dengue is far from being disseminated, there isn’t much point in going to the doctor when you have the fever unless you are showing signs of the most serious variation of the disease (dengue hemorragic fever). In our church only last week we were three or four persons sick with the fever at the same time. It pretty much sucks all the energy out of you, knocks you out with a severe headache (specially behind the eyes), and after four days of being totally miserable, you may roam around for about a week with heavy doses of Tylenol and a shitload of fatigue.

Thank God the kids didn’t get it.

Of course, we’ve had an unusual very wet January. The upside is that it’s not too hot. The downside is that, well, the mosquitoes are having a feast (on me) and I’m missing the SUN!!! Argh. We didn’t move from Canada to have yet another endlessly grey sky. I’m sick of it. I was so mad that I actually asked D if it would be hard to go back to Canada!

“You’re kidding, right?!”, “No, what was the point in coming here if it won’t *&?% stop raining!? ” “Um, I think you’re forgetting things; you wouldn’t be standing here, on the terrasse, wearing a summer dress and Havaianas, holding Uriel in your arms, outside, in the middle of January (for the record, I think the baby was only wearing a diaper too)!”

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