SO I GOT DENGUE.....
BUT DON’T WORRY MOM…. I (BARELY) SURVIVED!!!!!!!!!!
BUT DON’T WORRY MOM…. I (BARELY) SURVIVED!!!!!!!!!!
So I got dengue and it was awful.
That’s about all I need to say in this post, but since it consumed about a week of my life and threatened to stop me from going to visit my new site, I’ll give it the respect it deserves and write a whole blog post about the big D.
Let me walk you through it.
Saturday night we had a big birthday bash for 5 of the PCTs who all magically had birthdays on the same week. We did it potluck style, rented out a super nice house with a pool, and all had some good American fun. You all know the drill.
Anyway, I wake up on Sunday morning and I’m not feeling so hot. My whole body just aches and I try to stay in bed as long as possible. I finally suck it up, get out of bed, and drag my sorry ass out to the soccer field because its Sunday, and guess what we do? We watch soccer on Sundays. So I managed to do that just fine, but screaming at the players in English just took so much out of me. My cousin also decided to win a 12 pack of beer at the game and so after the game we start to pass that around. I’m sitting there, around 8pm, thinking to myself, damn, when did I turn into such a baby? I literally couldn’t even lift the beer up to my sad little lips who didn’t even want the free beer. Finally, I admit my defeat and I just try to get some sleep. However, that doesn’t happen because around 11pm the headache hits.
BOOM.
As soon as that pain sets in behind the eyes, you know its dengue. I’m the 9th person in my training group to get dengue, so I knew. I literally said out loud “No, Dengue, go away!” and went to bed. But Dengue didn’t get the memo, because I woke up for class with a 102 degree fever.
Since I brought it up, let me take a second to explain just how common dengue is within our training group. The poor first guy to get dengue in our group happened to be named David. Every single person, including the Master Trainer, called him Dengue David (since we have three different Davids, this caught on very quickly because it differentiated him). It’s now week 9 and we had to change naming system. Now we call the only David left who hasn’t had dengue yet, David without Dengue (I know we are so original)!
Okay, back to ME!
So I tried to skip class to get some sleep because I told myself I would just sleep this one off. But no, I get a call from the doctors (in Spanish) and I’m just sitting in my room, clutching my phone, trying to respond back to the doctors, but completely failing since I decided to respond to all their questions in English. Regardless, somehow, someone knew to come get me and bring me to the Peace Corps Medical Office in Asuncion. There, they took my blood away from me and told me it had dengue in it. So that was it. But, my blood pressure decided to drop to a whopping 94/62, so they decided between that and my fever of 102 and climbing that I shouldn’t be allowed home. So they kept me. From here on out, it’s pretty uneventful stuff. I wanted to leave, they told me no, you’re so great, you can’t leave us, so I stayed a little longer and slept in the big comfy beds with AC.
I finally was able to break free (and by break free I literally mean just walk out) to make it to our site presentations! The fever lasted about 5 days, but the entire body aches lasted about 7 days. Unfortunately I had to leave for my site visit after around 4 days with the dengue, and that was not ideal. It took everything in me not to puke on my host mom when I met her. BUT we are all good now, I made it to my site visit and I finished recovering there! Screw you, dengue!
So sorry mom, I forgot to mention that I had dengue, but I love you!