Like what seems like everybody in Trinidad at the moment, I was down for a week with the nasty but so far non-lethal virus affectionately known as "the gunya." It's not Ebola, thank God, or I'd likely be writing about chikungunya from the grave.I say "was down" even though I am still somewhat affected–persistent joint stiffness and fatigue are some of the souvenirs I now have, but it's early days yet. If there are no worse after-effects, I got off lightly; some people will end up with far more painful and permanent reminders, in the form of arthritis.ChikV is nasty, as I said before. My experience of it started about a week and a half ago, when I found I couldn't walk three city blocks without stopping to rest. I was nauseated and tired, but brushed it away as just one of those things.
The next morning an ankle I had recently sprained started to ache again for no reason. By that night I couldn't walk at all. Both ankles and feet were stiff and painful, and the agonising pain was creeping up incrementally to affect my knees and hips. The worst pain seemed to lodge in my left little toe, which felt as though it had had a run in with a sledgehammer. Electric zings of pain would randomly run through my body, contorting me like one of those cartoon characters from my childhood: Wily E Coyote hit by lightning, his skeleton momentarily visible as the current whizzed through him.Then the fever and chills kicked in. Wrapped in a sheet and by now guzzling coconut water and Panadol at regular intervals, I spent the next few days on the couch–mostly because I couldn't get off it. I lacked the strength to stand; and even when I could stand up, my limbs and spine were in such excruciating agony that I quickly found myself back in a supine position.
I spent Monday weeping softly on the couch. By then my wrists had swollen so my hands looked like they belonged to Mickey Mouse. I was so weak I couldn't type or hold a book, and with the headache I had on and off for the next three days I couldn't read anyway.It was around that time I started to itch. Maybe it was psychosomatic, but my skin felt as though it was crawling with red ants. I scratched my hands raw before I got some antihistamine syrup to quell the fire. By the time the rash on my arms showed up a couple of days later, I was already fed up of scratching.
The cruellest thing about ChikV was the false optimism it bred. I'd experience brief windows of improvement–yay, the swelling on my ankles had gone down!–only to be swept back to the couch by fever or new, fierce pains in another part of my body. Then my glands swelled, the swelling bringing a whole new and exciting pain with it.
The week before, three of my extended family members had also had the virus. I took one of them to the clinic and the nurse observed that everybody in the clinic, as well as the staff themselves, seemed to have had ChikV. In my church choir, at least three other people had it before me, and on my Facebook feed friends from Grenada and Jamaica are dropping like flies. ChikV has united the Caribbean.But, like I said at the start of this column, at least it's not Ebola.
Over in the US the federal and state governments are reeling from reports of new cases. Unlike ChikV, Ebola kills about half the people who get it. Reports indicate that 10,000 people in Africa have contracted it. Like most people, I'm enormously grateful that we are in a Chikv epidemic rather than an Ebola epidemic here. ChikV isn't deadly, just painful.The Caribbean wouldn't know where to start with Ebola, which is a terrifying prospect as it is almost sure to end up here sooner or later. (In my mental Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse stakes, famine, Isis and SkyNet are being edged out by pestilence at the moment.)You only have to have seen one zombie movie to imagine the end of the world coming in the form of a deadly plague. For our own sakes, I pray the US gets it together and figures out a practical and practicable response to Ebola, because if Ebola hits the region like ChikV has, it wouldn't be funny at all.