Dang the dengue

I did not see it coming.

It could have leapt at me from the longkang and hung on to my leg hair, with its dear life. Or it could have flown right at me like a missile from the park.

However it attacked, it did so noiselessly.

Slightly more than a week ago, I fell victim to the darn aedes mozzie.

Looking back, it was such an unjust attack. I did nothing to provoke the bloody mozzie. And I was certain I didn’t go around offering my blood to anyone or anything, like I was bloody Bella Swan.

Fine, I may have played a part in trying to destroy your family lineage, but why take offence? Everyone’s doing it, it’s trendy.

Why attack me, instead of my friend DC, who’s as fair as a char siew bun next to me? What’s wrong with you? You’d rather make a meal out of skin and bones? You don’t like the Marshmellow Man?

I hope you had diarrhoea or died of food poisoning shortly after you bit me.

Of course, I wouldn’t know for sure.

What I did know was, you zapped the life out of me.

Somewhere in Yishun, you must be feeling great, having sucked the fitness, stamina and agility out of me. I hope the energy made you so high you crashed into a wall.

As for me, I was left debilitated by dengue.

For five days, I was enveloped in heat – and not in a good way either.

My temperature spiked, hovering around 39.2 degree Celsius. Even showering with my heater seemed cooling, I kid you not.

My spine felt strained. My thighs ached. My head throbbed. And every little movement I made hurt.

Even lying in bed – and not doing anything – was no easy task. My bones constantly radiated with pain even though I lay there and pretended to be a bolster.

Fortunately, my platelet count didn’t plunge below 60 – a threshold that would warrant for me to be warded.

It went from 200 to 180, and then to 190, signs which my doctors saw as encouraging.

When rashes set in on both my forearms on Day Three, my arms looked like they belonged to a part of an eczema poster.

But I must say I made good progress.

By Day Five, fever broke, and all I felt was lethargy – which my doctor said will go away only after three weeks.

Good grief.

That means, I would not be allowed to continue training for my Half Ironman Race in August – an event I had been looking forward to since the end of May.

Yes, all my weeks of hard work – clocking swim, run and bike mileage, and doing grueling bricks involving swim-runs and bike-runs – have all gone down the drain, no thanks to one bloody aedes mozzie.

But the good thing is, I didn’t die from dengue.

I may feel exhausted all the way till National Day – and I’ll probably pant every time I take the stairs, but I am determined to shed this lethargy soon.

One week’s down-time is really enough.

I’m determined to build my energy from scratch.

The rest is history.