viruses

Swimming in vast oceans, looking up at the big night sky speckled infinitely with stars--things that normally make people feel small, that there exists so much beyond our grasp that it's mind-blowing how much and how little feeling we encompass in our tiny capsule in never-ending other capsules. Over the holidays, ending my 2014 and starting 2015, I found another such wonder: the virus. The so-called benign, self-limited bug that is too common, too fleeting, and too un-sexy to ever find residence alongside the ocean and the night sky.

But after last week, I can tell you that if ever something made me feel taken over by a power beyond my control, it is the virus called Coxsackie that causes hand-foot-mouth disease. I caught it from my nephews and niece, who from oldest to youngest caught it from each other in succession. The oldest cried for a day due to the sore throat and aches and recovered; the middle cried because she thought her rash looked dirty; the youngest didn't even know he had it. For me, decades older and weaker, each day of the week-long experience is seared in my memory.

The first day, the febrile fatigue hit me all of the sudden. We'd made plans to go the beach, and on our way there I started to feel sick-tired, the kind of unusual discomfort that doesn't stem from internal exertion or external tangibles, that you know is coming from something foreign. After the gradual beginnings, it hit me hard and I ended up passing in and out of sleep for a few hours in the car instead of going to the beach. Deep chills flared in my head and stomach and muscles and bones, despite layers of clothes, a fleece blanket, and car-powered heat. M drove us to the grocery store to get me sick-food and while waiting for him in the car, I almost despaired--so much was going in my body and I was at a loss as to how to make it better. It wasn't just temperature, or nausea, or anything concrete. It was the awful of a sickness you can't touch. I went home, M made me warm, comforting pasta with a lot of garlic, and I fell into a sleep thanks to Nyquil. I had to start work the next day, and for the next couple days of work, I continued to intermittently feel the chills and this vague but deeply uncomfortable sickness.

Then, I noticed a faint rash on my hands, and the second wave of the virus hit: spots spread over my face, hands, and feet and sores developed everywhere in my mouth and most noticeably in the back of my throat. I once told Jen that one of my top ten worst things in life were chancre sores. She laughed, saying, what about war and violence? These sores are right up there; they have that vile quality of being absolutely relentless. Probably for the first time I had a glimpse into what a constant physical pain might feel like--it burned all day and all night, regardless of whether I was eating or speaking, though those simple actions made it so much worse I avoided them. It wasn't the kind of sore throat that ice cream or soup would soothe--extremes in temperature worsened it. (Imagine the kind of evil that makes you turn on ice cream). This lasted for a few days and got so bad I took a day off work, nursing my throat with viscous lidocaine and killing my kidneys with ibuprofen, all of which took the sensation away only for moments and sometimes not at all.

By the time the throat healed, the blisters on my face (on my FACE, branding me and making visible the invasion of this microscopic power) and hands and feet started to hurt, mostly the ones on my feet, making it hard for me to walk. Even now, two weeks later, the skin is still recovering from the pockets of invasion. And so this is how I came to know the multiple stages of this attack by Coxsackie.

Also strangely and in stages, this sickness was bookended by more minor viruses. Before I got sick with Coxsackie, I had had another virus with a more conventional sore throat and mild cough that I fought off with tea, garlic, and cough drops and that had melted away for about a day before Coxsackie hit. Then soon after I recovered with Coxsackie, I had another episode of febrile fatigue in the setting of being sleep-deprived, that went away with more rest. We are so used to being agents that it really struck me how our bodies are vessels for other, tiny, impactful beings. It sounds so pathetic to compare my virus to the illnesses our patients face, but I do think the debilitating vulnerability and helplessness was a small window into understanding both how fragile the perceived strong are, and how strong the perceived fragile are. And that these things that we see as invading our bodies, so different from and foreign to us, are maybe just settling into similar territory. Us and viruses. Tiny. Impactful. Beings.