I Got A Fever...And The Only Prescription Is More...Wait, There Is No Prescription. I Have Dengue.

Approximately one week after Andrea left Puerto Rico, Dan acquired the flu, which is still going strong on the island. He had a fever and chills one night and was very weak/tired for the following few days. A few days after Dan began to feel better, I was hit by a ton of bricks. One weekday night, I was watching the latest episode of House on my computer when I began to feel sick. I started the episode feeling great, but once I got to the end and packed up my computer, I could barely stand up. I also got the chills to a degree I have never felt. My whole entire body was shaking, so much so that my teeth began to hurt from all the chattering. It is generally about 90 degrees in my apartment, even at night. Despite the heat, I was freezing. I became very weak and decided to go to bed early. I notified my roommates of my bizarre illness, took some Tylenol, threw on a sweatshirt, and hopped under the covers.

I woke up at least 5 times during the evening. Sometimes I woke up with the same extreme chills, sometimes I woke up drenched in sweat. My entire bed was soaked with sweat. I felt too sick to move or do anything about it, so I laid there most of the night. I knew I had a high fever, but we didn’t have a thermometer. The next day I woke up with 3 more symptoms. 1) I had absolutely no appetite. 2) Every part of my body ached. It was the feeling of squatting in the weight room for the first time in a long time, except everywhere on my body. This made it hard to even walk. 3) The worst part by far was the extreme migraine. I had trouble looking at light. Then I had trouble moving my eyes around. If I looked up, my eyes had a sharp, shooting pain. I won’t go into how the situation of me not having insurance yet or expound on the way my sickness was handled, but I went on this way for another 2-3 days. We finally got a thermometer after I was feeling somewhat better and my temperature keep floating between 101.5 and 102. I couldn’t believe how much better I felt compared to the first few days and my temperature was 102. What was my temperature that first night? 104?

Eventually, I broke into an unbelievable rash all over my body. Up until this point a doctor and many others decided I had the flu. The rash, though, is a Dengue Fever hallmark. I finally got to a doctor and got some blood work done. I had Dengue Fever. On a side note, the doctor noticed I had huge bites of some sort in my groin region. Before I could even begin thinking about how that could have happened, he told me that the bites were from small ants. Outstanding! The hormiguitas are expanding their borders from the kitchen to my bedroom. Just last week, I woke up to them crawling all over my face. Good stuff. So with Dengue, you can’t really do anything about it. It’s just like a severe flu with more intense symptoms. The major thing you have to be careful about with Dengue is developing the most severe strain. About a week after symptoms, your white blood cell counts drops more than it already has and you are generally in the hospital for a while. I don’t know all the technical terms; you can look those up medical crowd. It’s called Hemorraghic Dengue Fever.

After the major symptoms die down, the full recovery takes a few weeks. I lost 15 pounds and felt pretty weak for a long time. Collective wisdom and some decent airfare lead me to participate in a weeklong recovery program at Kearney Hospital in Palos Heights, Illinois. I basically slept the whole week. The following weekend, I was lucky enough to make it to the Notre Dame vs. USC game in South Bend. I journeyed back to a scorching hot PR on Sunday.