How bad is this thing, this virus-borne disease called
chikungunya? I give you one example….
Stephanie is what the writer Malcolm Gladwell once
called a weak connection—nor is there anything pejorative about that. It simply
mean that we have—as we’ve so far discovered—three things in common: we both
play the cello, she walks dogs and I love dogs, and we both hate Monsanto.
All of this mean that you really should say hello to
Stephanie when you meet her on te street, so I did. We gave each other the
standard Puerto Rican peck on the left cheek. And five minutes later? We were
all but writing each other into our wills!
“It’s been seven weeks with this thing,” she said, which
were the first clues. Because despite every web site that says, “most cases of
the disease resolve within two to three days,” I’ve met only a few that have.
Instead, this disease is carving out new territory: it is both acute and
chronic.
“You know what the worst thing about this disease is,” I
said. “It’s having to hear every healthy person tell you their home remedy to
cure it.”
That’s when it clicked.
“Totally,” she said, “I had one friend tell me to take a
red-hot pepper….”
“I can see so clearly where I would have put that pepper….”
“And you know, I went to this specialist speaking to a crowd
out on the plaza a couple of days ago, and guess what he said? He urged people not
to go to La Perla….”
“Why are people going to La Perla?” It’s our nearby slum,
where you can get drugs slightly stronger than the Tylenol that the doctors are
recommending.
“They go, buy some heroin—just enough to test positive—and
then register to receive methadone, which is one of the strongest pain
medications. Then, they get their doctor to prescribe steroids, so now, guess
what? They’re telling people they’re perfectly fine, they feel great, and guess
what? They’re out there fucking running! They still have the disease,
they still have the virus, but they’re medicated up to their tits! And they’re
out there fucking running!”
“I get that,” I told her, “since I went to my doctor and she
suggested Tylenol. And I said sure, as well as we augment with a morphine
drip….”
“And you know the other thing about the disease? Besides the
joint pain, the fever, the cold sweats, it also gives you depression! Isn’t
that great! And then you have your friends looking at you like you’re an alchie
who refuses to go to AA, and they’re saying, ‘well, why haven’t you boiled a
mango and added a little cinnamon?’ Well, I tell you why: the effort of bending
over to dig out a pan, much less the pain involved in peeling a mango….”
I knew just what she meant.
“What I hate,” I told her, “is that the person who tells you
about the mango and the cinnamon? The next day he tells you that the mango /
cinnamon thing is completely worthless, and today what you have to do is
get star anise and malagueta leaves
(sorry—too tired to look that up) and infuse them in boiling water…”
“And you know what,” she interrupts, but that’s totally OK,
because we both surfing the same wave, so who cares what surfboard we’re on?
“They’re telling people NOT to go to the emergency room, since why bother? They
might as well record a message, and play it over the PA system: “If you are
experiencing severe joint pain, fevers of up to 105 degrees, inability to move,
severe fatigue and crushing depression, get the hell out of here, go home,
drink lots of water, and take Tylenol. And good luck, because you’re screwed.”
“First, of course, they’d charge the fifty dollar
deductible….”
“Well, you have to admit, it would be more efficient,” I
told her. “A friend went with his son to the ER, and it was filled with kids,
all bent over, all walking around looking sort of like miniature Frankensteins,
just after they had been zapped to life. Nine hours, he spent, just to be
told….”
“And what is this shit about ‘drink lots of water?’ You know
what? Any time a doctor has no goddamn clue what to say to a patient, he or she
advises rest, Tylenol, and drink lots of water! Why? It’s a litany for them!”,
So today? The virus is doing a variant of the 19th
century grand tour, since it’s not just my wrists and fingers that hurt, but
also my hips and ankles. I’m still fatigued, I’m still sweating, I want to be
in bed but guess what? There’s a point when lying in bed hurts just as much as
being up.
And this post ends with something far more efficacious than
that trinity of water, rest, and Tylenol. Try a little catharsis, via Handel:
I will bemoan my fate
so cruel and brutal
as long as there is breath left in my body.
And when I am dead and become a ghost, I will haunt the tyrant night
and day.
(English translation grabbed from this Kimmel Center website.)
