What a 360 degree of separation!
While I spent the first three weeks in April 2012 really enjoying my trip in the U.S. a year later I have to spent 1 and a half week at home resting due to Dengue Fever!
It was an endemic in Indonesia and in it was also one of the disease that took my father in 2010 😦 I myself have had very bad experiences with this type of fever.
My first experience was back in 2005, when I was suspected to have contracted the fever because I showed some of the symptoms including high fever. Doctors in Indonesia, always want to be on the safe side with symptoms of high fever. Usually, if we had a high fever for around three days, they will order the patient to have a blood test. In my case, the blood test shows my Trombosit to be below the normal band of 150.000. However, at that time I also had stomach problem. I have to spent two nights at the hospital and it turns out that I have intestine problem and not Dengue Fever.
Second time around is in 2009 where I experienced high fever for more than two days, headaches and muscle and joint pains.My trombosit also fall below normal band. But this time I insisted not to be treated in the hospital. Part of it because I don’t want to leave my daughter home alone (my husband was away for work at that time). So, I just tried to had enough rest, drank lots of water and I also followed what people has been suggesting i.e. drank guava juice. I think I managed to drink 1 litre of Guava juice a day for two days in a row! I dont know whether its due to the juice or because of the rest, thankfully I got better.
Then about 10 days a go, I suddenly suddenly felt a really terrible headache and a mild fever. I went to the doctor, and he said that if it is just a common flu, the fever will usually around the neck and up. But since I got it all over my body, he was worried that I got contracted with Dengue Fever. He ordered a simple test by squeezing my arm for five minutes to see if there And his hypothesis was right, after five minutes there were were tiny red spots in my arms, which indicated that there were intravascular bleeding. He still ordered me to have a blood test afterward. The result showed that my trombosit is still above normal but the SGOT/SGPT (indicators for liver function) were way too high. He ordered me to take enough rest, drink a lot of water and eat properly. So, that’s what I did. For three days, I just lay in bed. Thankfully, I got better.
But those days of recovery really get me thinking: I must have became so prone to the disease that it came to me twice. How do I prevent it to happen again? The first thing that I read is that this fever has no vaccine yet, so the only way to prevent it: reducing the habitat and the number of mosquitoes and limiting exposure to bites.
During the period of rainy seasons, there have been quite a lot of pool of clear water where the Aedes Aegypti mosquito usually lives. Lately, there were also effort by the government to do “fogging” around the neighborhood affected by the disease. But, it was done with really toxic insecticide and it will only kill the mature mosquitoes not the larvae!
So I guess in addition to keeping your surrounding clean from pool of waters, the best way is by keeping our immune systems! This is something that I have not been able to do recently. I had a very bad routine which include work, traveling, lack of nutrition and most importantly lack of exercise 😦 that made my immune system so weak. I really need to improve this!! Here to better weeks ahead!
The M Ways 