West Nile virus: It could happen to you
BY DON R. READ, MD I will never be normal like I was before I got sick. I couldn’t run if it were an emergency. I cannot ride a bicycle, although I can sort of halfway dance with my wife. I can’t carry my grandchildren up the stairs. I am never sick. I was a perfectly healthy sur-
geon, working 88.7 hours a week on average. I had missed only four days of work from illness in my 27 years of practice until a mosquito bit me seven years ago. A few days later, on a Tuesday, I was unusually exhausted after performing a colon operation, so I went home and went to bed. The next morning, I had only a low-grade fever, but I had terrible muscle aches all over. I felt like I was going to die. I thought that if I didn’t feel better soon, I would have to go to the emergency department. Fortunately, I starting feeling a little better, so I went to work and did several colonos- copies, after which I had to go home and go back to bed. I canceled all my office patients for the next two days. I felt as though I was carrying a backpack with 1,000 pounds of bricks in it. Despite feeling like I was going to die, I did not
have any localizing symptoms — no sore throat, runny nose, cough, or diarrhea. Thursday morn- ing, while making rounds in the hospital, I ran into one of my infectious disease colleagues in the hall. I told him how I felt and asked him if it could be West Nile virus. He said that it could but that I hadn’t had the symptoms long enough to be able to test for it. I told him I was supposed to fly to Indiana in two days to attend my daughter’s doctoral organ recital. He said, “Oh, go ahead. If you still feel bad when you get back, we’ll run some tests and see if that’s what you had.” On Saturday, I flew to Indi-
Don R. Read, MD
ana. By that time, I was sleep- ing 20 hours a day. On the day
38 TEXAS MEDICINE November 2012
of my daughter’s recital, a week from the onset of my disease, I slept all day, got dressed, vid- eotaped the recital, and then went back to bed. The following morning, I tried to get out of bed, only to discover that my legs were paralyzed. My family took me to the emergency department. By that evening, I was in the intensive care unit (ICU). My legs were completely paralyzed; my arms were mostly paralyzed; I was sleeping 23-and-a- half hours a day. I could not talk. I could not hear. I could not write. I could not even turn over in bed. My legs cramped so badly that I required IV Dilaudid for pain control. I spent four-and-a-half weeks in ICU, then two months in an inpatient rehabilitation hospital, followed by one month of home care and three months of all-day outpatient rehab. I had to re- learn how to walk, how to talk, and how to write. I was out of work for seven months. When I first went back to work, I could see patients for only one hour before I had to go home, exhausted, and go back to bed. It took a year to be able to work 35 hours a week. Because of the residual leg weakness from the polio-like paralysis, I have to wear braces on both legs and therefore had to give up performing abdominal surgery. Although it continues to improve very slowly, my stamina is far from normal. I am happy to be alive, but my body will never be normal again. Dallas County is using aerial spraying — at the
urging of my colleagues at the Dallas County Medical Society and me — to prevent this life- threatening virus. I want to prevent as many people as I can from going through what I did.
Dr. Read is a member of the TMA Board of Trust- ees. He is past president of the Texas Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons.
Reprinted with permission of
KevinMD.com.
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