'Tis the Season (for Dengue)

VSO Programme Office, Phnom Penh.

My toes ache so much that I’ve considered trapping them in the door just to change the feeling in them. Yesterday it was my heel that was causing all the pain and the day before my forearm. I expect that tomorrow it will be my little finger or some other equally trivial part of my body which I usually never give a second thought too until this “Break Bone Fever”, otherwise known as the Dengue fever virus, decides to manifest itself there.

Anyone who saw me at 6am last Thursday would be forgiven for thinking that I had just crawled in from an extremely heavy night in Heart of Darkness and the other watering-pits of PP. Clutching my head, bouncing off walls on the way to the bathroom, each time uttering progressively worse expletives, and eyes so bloodshot Frankenstein’s Monster would have run scared – it must have looked like the worst hangover in history. The truth is that for once I’d been tucked up at 7pm after taking antibiotics and hoping to be back at work the next morning. Now, having been confirmed to have dengue, it looks like I’ll be off for at least two weeks.

Caused by a virus carried by the Aedes mosquito, prevalent in both urban and rural environments during the day, there’s not much you can do to prevent dengue except for walk around in a giant mosquito net every second of the day. Being a little too fashion-conscious for that, I’ve chosen to stick to just wearing DEET mosquito spray but unfortunately this hasn’t been enough. Now, I’m just one in a long line of volunteers who’s been on virtual house arrest in the Programme Office during these months of “Dengue Season” whilst I rest and wait to feel better.

While I feel ill and that’s obviously never pleasant, the timing is also particularly bad. I’ve only done 3 day in my office at work and really just want to get stuck in. The real reason for me coming out to Cambodia to start with seems to be getting further from my reach with each passing day. I know I have to be patient and I’ve been told by so many serving volunteers “don’t stress – work’s never as exciting as it sounds when you have to do it” but still, I’m getting frustrated. At least my colleagues in Mlup Baitong are all sympathetic. Most of them have had krun chiam – blood disease – before so know that I’m not just being a pathetic foreigner and I really do need to rest. Even though I sound miserable, I really am in the best pace to be ill. There are people in and out of the PO most of the time so word has spread quickly that I’m ill and in between the DVDs and the Disney Channel I’ve been having phone calls and messages to keep me entertained. In fact, within half an hour of coming back from the doctors with my results, I had texts from volunteers in 4 different provinces wishing me a speedy recovery (if you ever need a message taken from one end of Cambodia to the other, VSO vols are by far the fastest way to do it – we should start our own communications service). So, having already had two visitors today, Richard and Alan, I’m worn out from socialising and plan to go back to bed for another few hours.