Last Wednesday night after dinner, C said she felt a bit hot. Twenty minutes later her temperature was up around 40 deg - and within a couple of hours I was certain she had dengue fever. There is a large outbreak of the disease on the island at the moment - around 600 reported cases so far - although they are not yet calling it an epidemic.The symptoms vary a bit from person to person, but she has the classic signs: sudden onset of high fever, severe headache and pain behind the eyes, nausea, aching muscles and joints - dengue is also called 'breakbone fever' because of the pain - bleeding gums and feeling very weak. Not very nice at all; and the poor wee poppet has been lying on the couch or in bed for the last three days, either shivering under a blanket or with the fan on full-blast.
Her temperature is much lower today - and she has broken out in the classic dengue rash, bright red, literally from top to toe. This is apparently a sign the worst is over, so that's good. Some people bounce back after a week or so - others feel quite weak for months. Hopefully she will be of the former variety.
People with dengue are encouraged to go get a blood test, so they can track the numbers and also identify which strain of dengue it is. All well and good, but the hospital is overflowing with germy people right now, you have to wait hours for a jab, and there's nothing they can do to make you any better - so I decided not to get it done. (Neither did my boss, or three of my neighbours, who have all had dengue in the last couple of weeks, so the numbers are likely to be a lot higher than the official figures.)
I did however take her to Pa, the local guide/herbalist/medicine man, who pounds a herbal mix for anyone who asks, free of charge. He is quite a character, nearly 70, with long, grey dreadlocks; and many of the islanders swear by his dengue medicine. C was too ill to hang on to the back of the scooter, and it was raining, so I took the bike to my friend Nancy's house and swapped it for her car. The herbal mix was dark green and not very nice; C had two doses. After the second dose her temperature dropped quite markedly, but it went up again that night, so maybe we did not have enough of it.
Anyway, so life has ground to a halt, in the way it does when a child is sick - everything is cancelled and nothing else matters. Very much hoping I don't catch it, as looking after C would then be very difficult. Dengue is a mosquito-born disease; all it would take for me to get it would be for a mozzie to bite C and then me. The house has screens on the windows and doors, but we now also have mosquito coils burning outside the door, to stop them coming in when I go in and out.
C was sad that she wouldn't be able to organise a present or make me breakfast in bed tomorrow like she usually does for Mother's Day. This weekend also marks exactly a year since we moved to the island. But we had a lovely surprise: she had entered a newspaper competition earlier in the week where you had to write 50 words about why your Mum deserved a prize. We got a phone call yesterday to say she had come third - winning yours truly a $100 deli-food hamper! They wanted to come take a picture -- but at that particular moment she was hanging half off the bed over a bucket, not feeling at all like publicity. They dropped the hamper off this morning and we oohed and aahed over the unexpected treats: Italian arborio rice, dark chocolates, meringues, French pate, a bottle of wine and so on. Yum!
Meringues are apparently good for dengue fever, too.
*******
