Sick: Fearing Dengue Fever
Our three-year old was sick this week. On Wednesday night he woke us again and again with terrible diarrhea, burning up with fever.
At one point I saw a faint glow from the bathroom (where we get the best Internet reception), and I found my husband there, hunched over the computer screen, googling his symptoms.
There’s no malaria in Bahia, at least, but there is dengue fever.
And the mosquitos have been bad lately. Some days they’re worse than others, inexplicably. They leave welts, especially on the baby. We all sleep under nets, pale blue tulle suspended from the ceiling, but the one over the crib has slightly bigger holes, or maybe a gap between the bottom of the net and the floor, and they slip in.
There are no screens on the windows, just wide black mesh with holes too big to keep out or in anything much smaller than a young child (a speculation which hopefully will not be tested, because I doubt it will actually hold a small child in that well).
Our bedroom window opens onto the dunes, which are spotted with scrub and a few palm trees, and white and undulant as low-hanging clouds.
That’s where the mosquitoes come from. They breed in the black Abaeté lagoon.
People bathed there once, and the women used to do their wash in the water. But now it’s too polluted, from the long slough of Fels Naptha, or just the effluent of so many bodies living in close proximity, the runoff, the copious human waste.
My son’s fever came and went for three days, leaving him weak and washed up on the couch. His usually headstrong disposition muted, overcome.
Ta mole, the nanny said. Mole: the same word for soft fruit, or an easy task.
He let me stroke his back and meekly accepted sips of seltzer and coconut water.
We debated trying to find a pediatrician who could see him with such short notice, but knew that realistically we’d end up sitting in a crowded emergency room for hours, only to be told to make sure he’s drinking enough fluids.
Probably more responsible parents would have already had a doctor lined up, after having been here for a month. All we had was a few scraps of papers with some names and numbers scribbled on them.
In any case, finally, by the third evening, he was back to his contentious self, yelling that he didn’t want the fork with a bent tine, hitting his brother for no apparent reason. He was enough back to normal for me to completely lose my temper with him several times between dinner and bath time.
No more mole.
We got the older boys in bed early. Relief and guilt intertwined in me, like the bougainvillea that grows against the outer walls, winding its brilliant pink flowers between the shards of glass.
Already in my pajamas, I cradled the baby in my arms, walking him back and forth on the walkway in front of our house.
The rustle of the palm fronds calmed him, and me as well, the stillness that seems to deepen when you step outside at night, as though amplified by the quiet threat of violence beyond these walls, by the ocean’s flashing knife, by the darkness of Abaeté.
Eleanor Stanford is a published poet, Ph.D. dropout, and former Peace Corps volunteer. She lives in Bahia, Brazil with her husband and three young sons, where she works as a guidance counselor and blogs at The Golden Papaya.
