sick, postscript

To finish up with my West Nile Virus tale, I must add a postscript. I spent last summer recovering from my encounter with this exceedingly unpleasant virus. I slowly got back on the treadmill, starting at a crawl and working back up to the low speed I normally do. I jog on the treadmill, but my jog is about the same as my quick walk. I went back to the gym and started climbing again; it took several months to get back to where I’d been before and eventually I surpassed it and started getting better again. Climbing is hard to take time away from – you begin to lose endurance and strength almost immediately. My exhaustion dissipated slowly I could get through an entire day without hitting a wall of “omigod, I’m just done.” One moment I was awake and active and the next moment I had to put my head down and nap, totally beyond my control. By the time school began again in the Fall I was better – just as my doctor had predicted, a little less than three months.

In early September I looked at my email one morning and saw the name of one of my brothers in the subject line. I thought “oh this can’t be good,” and it wasn’t. The email was from his 9-month-pregnant wife telling us that he’d been admitted to the hospital with a mystery virus that a couple of days later was diagnosed as viral myocarditis. It’s a virus that causes inflammation of the heart muscle. When I told my doctor friends what he had, they all said “oh, that’s serious.”

The very next September day I got another email from my other sister-in-law with my other brother’s name in the subject line saying it was his “turn.” Oh, that can’t be good either. And it wasn’t. He was in the hospital with viral meningitis. So one heart virus, one brain virus.

Both boys (middle aged men, really) made full recoveries. But they had the same recovery experience as I did. It took far longer than expected and the reignition of the energy was a slow and ponderous process. Viruses are serious business.

My brothers and I don’t live anywhere near each other, and besides all three viruses are totally different. But somehow we managed to all get so ill we needed to be hospitalized within three months of one another – the two guys at the exact same time. A particularly odd coincidence.

As a postscript to the postscript: This summer I was nervous about mosquitoes – the beasts from whom I’d gotten my virus. I asked several doctors whether I was now immune to West Nile Virus and they all uttered exactly the same sentence in exactly the same intonation: “I think so” looking up and to the right in an unnerving wondering tone.