back in 2019 i made headlines locally, albeit anonymously: i was patient zero.
just back from a family trip to the Philippines, i had returned back to work for one day and then later that evening started feeling a little under the weather. i went to be early, figuring jet lag or maybe that i had picked up a cold on the flight back. when i woke up the next morning i made the call to stay home and rest up. by the time the weekend rolled around i knew i would have to skip a community event i was scheduled to attend for work on Saturday. I ended up calling an uber to get a ride to urgent care, where a heavy-handed doctor stuck a nasal swab waaaaaay too far up in my brain and later declared that it wasn’t the flu, and i should just go home and rest it out.
on sunday it was apparent that there was something wrong. my friend J volunteered to drive me to the emergency room. i checked in, they looked me over, brought me pretty quickly into a separate room, and a short 6 hours later or so decided to admit me overnight. by then i had been shuffling back and forth to the restroom all day and on my last trip had noticed in the mirror that i had some spots. as freckled as i am, it takes a lot for new spots to be noteworthy. when the nurse came back to the room to get me ready to be wheeled upstairs, i pulled down the corner of my hospital gown at my neckline and asked, “is this something…?”
“hmm?” he was distracted trying to get the hospital bed wheels to unlock, and looked up for about half a second. “maybe. we’ll have the doctor check that out in the morning.”
fast forward through a profoundly sleepless first night in the hospital to the next morning. the infectious disease doctor walked in the room, took one look at me and said simply: measles.
this was, if i’m remembering correctly, just before the outbreak of US measles cases started drawing all sort of attention in the pacific northwest and on the east coast. and this was definitely before “contact tracing” was a part of everyone’s daily vocabulary. for the next four days my mom, bless her heart, shuttled back and forth between my home, making sure my teenaged boys were fed and going to school, and the hospital to keep an eye on me and to help with FMLA paperwork at work and coordinating with the good people with public health.
i watched the news on tv in my still-pretty-out-of-it state for the next few days and listened to the reports of “the first reported case of measles in denver.” i saw on social media the predictable exchanges that played out in neighborhood facebook groups, including a majority of outraged and – i’m just going to say it – kind of asshole-ish comments from those who assumed that patient zero was a willfully irresponsible vector for this pesky virus or at least an ignorant anti-vaxer.
actually. now that i’ve had some time to look back it all, i do have to cop to the “ignorant” label. i guess most people know that when they travel internationally – particularly to countries with less developed public health systems in place – it’s wise to get all one’s immunizations topped off? (did you know that?) i had had all my childhood vaccinations. i had been to the Philippines on three other occasions, and had done a bit of international traveling over the last few years without incident. i honestly had no idea that our childhood vaccines expire after a period of time. luckily, my mom had had the measles as a child, and both of my children had had both of their MMR vaccines (and they got the good stuff too – not the low grade vaccines of my youth). so at least my immediate family was immune.
i did feel super bad about the idea that i might have unknowingly infected anyone else. doing the math, i liked my odds: the window for others was pretty narrow. my friend J though, was counseled to get a booster shot, and to get his teenage daughter tested to check her anti-virus levels. (as it turns out, even though she had gotten two doses of the “good” vaccines as a young child, it was determined that she too needed to be topped off.)
there’s a not a lot of there there with this particular post, is there? except maybe a minor PSA about travel medicine? or a reminder about not judging others without knowing the full story? or an unsubstantiated plot twist from J who mentioned in an off-handed kind of way the other day that he understands that there is some evidence that his “fresh measles vaccine” may have primed his immune system against the current virus that’s making the rounds…
the measles sucked. but the good news here is that there never was another measles case identified tied to my lonely outbreak of one.
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… just for fun: here’s a tiny clip of C riding the brakeless beater hotel loaner bike down a hill in Coron…
eleven bee 