ONE MAN has died in Barbados from dengue fever to date, and I am keeping all my fingers and toes crossed. If you have never had dengue before, pray to never ever contract any form of it, especially the severe haemorrhagic that can take you to your grave.
I can talk about dengue because I have experienced it first-hand and can tell you it is no sweet bread. Everybody knows you get it from mosquito bites, but I believe the mosquitos to fear most are those that often patrol in the daytime, clad in what appears to be striped stockings on their legs. Those, from my experience, are the ones with the dengue and they just zoom in for the kill.
I, unfortunately, contracted my dengue one day while sitting on my throne counting to the number two. I had reached that point of no return when, as it is with a sneeze where you can’t help closing your eyes, you become immobilised at a particular moment of delivery.
It was at that exact moment that a single mosquito in its grey and white stockings rose up from below like a Harrier jet on a vertical take-off and darted straight into my exposed leg.
All I could do was to watch her drill her proboscis deep into my skin and fill her gut with my blood. But my precise moment ended before she could finish and I slapped her so hard that it flattened her bloody and lifeless on my leg.
She was dead, but instinctively I knew that as she was taking my blood she was also rewarding me with a gift of thanks in the form of a dose of dengue fever.
By the next day, I had no reason to doubt my assumption as my head started to feel like somebody was cracking it open with a sledgehammer while simultaneously pushing my entire body into an oven. I became so tired that I couldn’t believe I would have life left for another minute. If that wasn’t terrible enough, progressively all my muscles and joints began to hurt as if it had done a pre-competition weight training session with Mr Olympia. It was agony beyond description.
And just as I began groaning out that once popular Jamaican dancehall line “Lord, I can’t take it no more” I found myself in more excruciating pain, this time in the back of my eyes. This might sound like an exaggeration, but it felt like my dentist had mistakenly got his pliers around my eye balls and was tugging them out of the sockets.
But more was to come with the passage of time. For, in addition to the cruel pain in the head, eyes, muscles and joints and the swollen glands, even the soles of my feet began to hurt.
Having suffered that bout, I am now immune for the rest of my life to that particular form of the fever. However, that also means that I am still as attractive as a dog to a flea to other forms, especially the haemorrhagic. And as much as I would again like to see my late father and other relatives on the other side, I certainly don’t want a mosquito to provide me with the passage.
That’s why I am appealing to the owners of the massively overgrown lots of land next to my house to please have them debushed and cleaned urgently. The bush on one side is so tall and thick that one morning I swore I saw a lion peeping out at me.
Happily it turned out to be my Akita which had climbed the wall and was hiding out doing a doo.
•Al Gilkes heads a public relations firm.
