The Fever
This
last Monday, within minutes of waking I realized I was pretty sick. My temperature was pushing 38° C (just up over 100° F) and it
wasn’t even seven in the morning yet. I took some Advil (the US equivalent of Nurofen) and just forced
myself to work. I couldn’t be out on Monday morning. By noon I was completely exhausted, the Advil had worn off and I found
myself slowly walking to the tube and coming back home. My temperature was up around 39° C (about 102° F) at that point. I think I
slept for most of the afternoon. To be honest, I can’t recall all that much of Monday afternoon.
When
I woke up Tuesday, my temperature was just over 40° C (104°
F). I had my first visit with the doctor on Tuesday, and I left
with a blood test appointment for Wednesday. The fever continued, unabated, day and night during all this. But on Wednesday
morning, my chest had broken out with chicken pox. I finally got back to the doctor on late Wednesday evening.
I
should explain how this works, because my American friends will find it baffling and my English ones, amusing. There’s an
art to booking an appointment at the surgery, as it’s called. Well, it’s an art at my surgery, anyway. Your best bet is to
call between nine and nine-thirty. But that only works in an emergency, like, being a middle aged guy with chicken pox. If
you want to do anything more, say, routine, it will take somewhere between two and four calls to make the appointment. The
first call is just to find out when to call. If they don’t have time this week, for example, they won’t book the following
week until Friday afternoon. There are lots of little rules like this, I don’t claim to know them all. I just know that when
you call on Friday, you’ll often be asked to call back again, and so forth.
Anyway,
I did go in for my blood test at 10:50, but I clearly had chicken pox at that point, and so I declined to take the test and
asked for an appointment with the doctor. They told me to go back home and call them between two and two thirty. Oddly enough,
there was a very proper gentleman in front of me who asked about the scheduling system. The woman behind the desk explained
that they really liked how it was working now because it was creating a really effective schedule and so forth. In a classic
English snub, this guy says, “well, yes, I can see that. The problem is that it really isn’t working well for the patients,
like me. I came in to make an appointment and I don’t understand why you can’t just book it right here and now.” And so forth.
Anyway,
I show up at 6:20 for my appointment and this is how it works. You get a ticket out of a book. Mine was 383. Then they tell
you to wait upstairs and listen for the doorbell. I’m not kidding about this.
So
you go upstairs, and there’s a small waiting room. It has three or four chairs on one side, four or five on the other, and
one lone chair opposite both (that is where I sat, of course, because I don’t want anyone exposed, especially pregnant women).
But here’s the rub. There’s no marquis with the current number or anything. You have to just figure it out.
And
the only way to do that is to ask around about what numbers everyone else has, until you find 382. And in the process, you
learn everyone’s number and a little bit about what people are there in groups and stuff, because you ultimately need to know
that everyone in front of you is going to go in when called.
Anyway,
there were two in front of me, clearly a 6:00 and a 6:10, but the doctor was still seeing a patient. And continued to see
that patient for the next hour, occasionally escorting her through the waiting room as they moved back and forth from the
real offices in the back to the doctor’s office. When the doorbell finally went off, everyone in the room jumped. I jumped
the highest, because it turns out that the doorbell was immediately above my right shoulder.
So
I showed him the spots and all that, and it was pretty much over in five minutes. That was bad. He was not recommending anything
except paracetemol (Tylenol) for pain. So I had to ask him about Aciclovir. I’d taken it as a preventive medication (lot of
good that did me), but I had also read that if used within 24 hours of the detection of spots it could really help.
So when I bring this up, he immediately asks me if I read this via US or UK sources. I told him that I had checked a number
of sites, including the NHS (National Health Service, UK)
and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control, US)
and the advice was pretty consistent. He told me very frankly that in the UK
they don’t really bother, but to his credit, he was willing to consult a reference. When he did so, he concluded that he was
ambivalent, and so I told him to write the prescription, and thereupon began taking 4,000 mg a day of acyclovir, one large
horse-pill five times daily four hours apart (8, 12, 4, 8, 12).
Of
course, it wasn’t quite that easy. It was so late when I was done that I had to go to the late-night pharmacy on Edgware Road. It’s close, but parking is kindof a pain. I was
also very conscious of the fact that I shouldn’t be out interacting with people, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
I got home around nine, exhausted.
The Pills
At
this point I was on a pretty regimented pill schedule. My fever was still raging and I had to have medicine in me 24x7 in
order to keep it down to 38° C (100° F). I was taking an alternating cycle of paracetamol (acetaminophen)
and ibuprofen. Unfortunately, the paracetamol took a long time to act and didn’t last all that long. But it provided a bridge
so that I wasn’t taking too much ibuprofen – that was really effective. But add two more pills (I have two standing prescriptions,
and no, I’m not telling you what they are) I was taking already, plus five Aciclovir, well, it got pretty crazy. I also had
to have Kara remind me to take ibuprofen in the early morning when I was liable to lapse. Whenever I didn’t do this I was
rewarded with a fever so high I was immobilized, shaking uncontrollably. We were talking about Wednesday above, but Thursday
stands out because it was the day of my highest pill count – twenty, I think, although it might have been twenty five.
One of the only highlights through this whole
ordeal was that I was able to keep myself reasonably fed and hydrated and I didn’t experience any serious side effects from
all the medicine.
The Itch
So
Thursday morning started out with an early morning course of pills, followed by the usual breakfast with acyclovir. It had
been 24 hours now since the spots had started to appear. I took stock of the situation. With kids, the spots move from head
to toe as they develop and the same was happening to me. My face, scalp, neck, chest and back were covered. My arms were starting
to develop. I had a few random ones elsewhere. They started on my chest, followed by my face and scalp and some of these were
progressing along quite a bit.
By
the afternoon, I was really getting worried. Kara wasn’t making eye contact with me. Things were bad. By this time, much of
my upper chest had pretty fully developed and was getting to the itchy stage. Other random spots were itching too. I realized
that I was entering into a new phase – the itch phase and I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I mostly tried to keep my focus
elsewhere and not on the itching and I was pretty successful at this. At this point I was quite afraid to touch any of them
because they are quite delicate and if I tore them I was worried about scarring. Alex has a bunch of new marks as a result
of his chicken pox.
But
the main reason for the fear was the sheer number of spots that were emerging. In some of the web sites I visited they banded
the case severity by the number of spots and it seemed an order of magnitude type exercise, i.e., you had a few tens of them,
or a few hundred, or a few thousand. I was heading rapidly towards the few thousand category and it scared me. By the evening,
my forehead was a solid mass of bumps from about a centimeter above my eyebrows all the way to the hairline. A solid mass
of bumps. Like a Klingon. Spots were coming out all over my face. My right arm was covered with a dense patterns of spots
from the shoulder to the wrist interspersed with patches a bit further along. My left arm wasn’t quite so bad. My chest and
back were somewhere between the two arms across their entire surface. And it really had only started to get to the legs at
this point.
I
honestly didn’t know how I was going to be able to handle it. I was also very concerned that with that many spots developing,
I was going to wind up with a lot of scars. Kara was even more concerned, I think. She was, as I said, very quiet.
In
the early evening, I was standing in the kitchen absent-mindedly scratching my chest, when I realized with a start that I
was scratching my chest. I wasn’t just poking here or there with an index finger, I was rubbing my upper chest with all fingers
on both hands. Within a fraction of realizing what I was doing, the itching began to set in along the outside of where I was
scratching and it was unbearable. I went hopping off to find Kara, saying something like, “honey, I need the calamine lotion,
um, RIGHT NOW.” Then I collapsed, writhing on the futon whilst Kara applied stinky calamine lotion liberally to my chest.
Romantic, huh?
It
helps a lot, by the way, although it’s very sticky and dense. I think it sounds like a very flowery sort of lotion, calamine,
like it comes from a cactus or a rubbery shrub of some sort. But I think it’s like a petroleum by-product or something. It’s
not very nice stuff.
Anyway,
that was the first and last time I made that mistake. The itching continued, though, and spread to my back, arms and face.
It gets to the point where it doesn’t take much to set it off. I had to re-apply once or twice that evening. But it wasn’t
until I got to bed that things really got bad.
I
was still laboring under the fever, remember, and it makes it very hard for me to sleep, primarily because my body temperature
is fluctuating and so I’m either sweating or freezing or some variation of the two, but not really ever at one constant place
for an extended time. On top of this, the spots continue to emerge. At bedtime, I’ve got a towel in the bed because I’ve got
so much calamine on me. But I could not fall asleep. I tried and tried. I got up and changed my environment. I finally took
sleeping pills, I think. I put calamine on several times. I took the towel out because it was too itchy against my skin. I
finally went down around three or three-thirty, I think.
The Turning Point
When
I awoke Friday morning, I was completely disoriented. It was around nine thirty, I think. I’d missed my first acyclovir, but
that wasn’t the first thing on my mind. The first thing that occurred to me was that I hadn’t had an early morning ibuprofen.
I’d been off medication completely for several hours. I checked my temperature, and it was either normal or almost normal.
What a huge relief. My fever had broken. I still had the pox to worry about, but the fever made things really, really hard.
My spots didn’t feel too bad, at that point. I didn’t really know what to expect. Do they flare up at certain times? They
felt OK at that point. I mean, when you have that many there is always a lot of itchyness, but that’s very different from
the kind of consuming itch that occurs when you scratch them.
But
as the day moved on, I began to realize that something more significant was happening. They weren’t touch-sensitive itchy
in the way they had been the night before. And I felt as though the swelling of all the bumps was down as well. All in all,
I was very encouraged. But I was also very weak. I ended up taking one or two naps (not an uncommon occurrence throughout
this ordeal). At four in the afternoon, I was up, alert and feeling, dare I say, almost OK. I took a baking soda bath on Friday
to try to help dry out the pox as well. By the evening, it seemed clear that the illness was in some form of remission. I
was actually losing spots by the evening. Unfortunately, I was also gaining a headache.
It
had been building in the late afternoon. I had to resort to taking ibuprofen again – that was really disappointing because
I was very happy to have just gotten off it. But two of them didn’t really make a difference. A bit before I went to bed,
I think I took four, figuring it was a migraine. I also drank a lot of water to make sure I wasn’t dehydrated (I wasn’t) and
so forth. And through all of this, the spots and bumps and rashes just started to calmly resolve.
It
was amazing. Basically, if a spot had progressed to the point where it had damaged the skin beyond just redness or swelling,
then it continued on through a half-hearted pimple and scab and so forth, but with much less sensitivity in terms of itching.
If it hadn’t progressed to that point, it just faded away. And since most of the emerging mass of pox were just spots and
bumps, the vast majority of them cleared up without going to scab. Don’t get me wrong, I still had hundreds that went the
whole cycle. It wasn’t a cake-walk.
But
it also seems very clear to me that the accumulation of whatever poison is in the acyclovir was enough to overcome the rapidly
growing virus and bring it under control. It was left to wither on the vine.
The Headache
I
was very optimistic heading into Saturday, but it was premature. I think the headache may have woken me up – I’m not sure.
But it was the most severe migraine I’ve ever had. I was basically not functional. It was so severe I was throwing up and
couldn’t keep anything down. And it was painful, man, by far the worst headache I’ve ever had. I woke up early, I think. I
remember winding up on the futon in the main living room on the 1st floor. I was just sitting there in agony. Kara
went and got me three pillows and a blanket, and I just collapsed on the futon, sleeping, getting up to go to the bathroom
(to throw up) and occasionally attempting to eat a small bit of cracker or drink a sip of water.
And
it continued on and on this way until the middle of the afternoon before it finally broke. It didn’t actually go away, it
just started to fade at that point. It had a long tail, as they say. But as it faded a side-effect kicked in – the headache
my brain needed to have to protest having had a migraine. When it was over, it was like my brain was a bit swollen, but wobbly
and ginger. Bruised, almost. And there was a headache that corresponded to that – the aftereffect of a migraine. That didn’t
actually clear up completely until well into the next day – Sunday. So I had a headache for almost sixty straight hours.
I
wasn’t capable of taking a bath or anything on Saturday, but the chicken pox were the least of my worries. I was done with
Calomine at this point. The itching really had backed off. There were still itchy patches, but they were well within my capability
to ignore. But I was very, very pimply at this point, especially on my chest and face. Even if I weren’t contagious, I wouldn’t
have gone out – I wouldn’t have been able to show my face in public at that point. I hadn’t shaved since Monday. I couldn’t
risk hitting a spot and ripping the skin off. There were pox all over my face and in my stubble. Really, I was not a pleasant
sight.
Recovery
On
Sunday, I tried to have a relatively normal day. Of course, that didn’t happen. Not even close. But I was more active. I did
some chores and played with the kids a bit more. Stuff like that. Still, I was running a low temperature by the evening. I
don’t think I took anything for it, but I definitely felt the impact of the activity. I had been so miserable for so long
that I felt great even though I wasn’t, I was still sick. You have to remember that aside from a few hours on Friday afternoon,
this was the first stretch of time I had where I was up and about and alert. The week was a blur – even when I was functioning,
like going to the doctor. I was still struggling under the weight of a fever and a bunch of medication to counter it.
On Monday, I got a card from work. It was awesome. Mostly all very sweet comments. At least one humorous cheap shot. That
kind of thing. This was on top of receiving an olive tree from the office on Friday. That was brilliant, or as we say in Boston, wicked pissah. It’s absolutely perfect for the front of the
house on the mew where it gets lots of sun and love. And there’s something symbolic about olives branches, olive trees, you
know? It made me feel like it was a peace token for my war-torn body. It was very comforting.
I
know, you’re probably saying I sound pretty hard up at this point. Well, I wasn’t crying during commercials on TV or anything.
I’d only been stuck in for two days at that point. But anyway, back to the current bit.
On
Monday, I also shaved. That was rough. It’s very hard to shave a week’s worth of stubble. It’s too long for the electric razor.
I hate straight razors. I have to clip it short and then shave it. It took a long time. But I also took a proper shower and
that felt great. I’d been taking baths because the showerhead has a really strong spray and it’s a little sharp even under
normal circumstances.
Tuesday
was my last day of officially being contagious. Luckily, at this point, the scabs were really coming off my face quickly,
making it much easier to bear going back to work on Wednesday. But I was tired, very tired by the end of Tuesday. I realized
that even though the scabs were healing and I was generally feeling OK, I didn’t have much stamina.
I
did make it to work on Wednesday, though, but I had an entirely different crisis Wednesday morning - a pulled muscle in my
middle back. It was excrutiating. Was it related? I don't know, it's awfully fishy. I was flat on my back for 45 minutes waiting
for the medicine to kick in. But I made it in.
