A Child With Dengue

The quiet disease that’s a parent’s worse fear

Our child under a mosquito net, when she was much younger

If you or someone you love has a suspected case of dengue please consult the medical links at the end and see a real doctor.

As a parent living in the tropics, my biggest fear is dengue. It’s the perennial wildcard, dealt out randomly by ubiquitous mosquitos, sometimes passing over you as a mild fever, sometimes shutting down your organs in a river of blood. I’ve had dengue and my wife has had dengue and while it fells people our age, our biggest fear is for our children. Now that fear has come true.

My infant daughter has dengue as I write this. I’m sitting on the hospital cot while she’s in the bed, thankfully recovering but with catheters and canulas from every major limb and orifice. It’s the hemorrhagic type, the bad one, the one characterized by ‘leakage’, a gentle way of saying that your blood is breaking down, spilling plasma across cell walls and organ boundaries.

This is needless to say bad.

The scary thing about dengue is that it’s a disease that you can’t fight with medicine or surgery. The only weapon we have is knowledge. Dengue is essentially fought with king coconut and two measuring cups.

If you don’t have this knowledge, dengue can quite easily and subtly kill you. The first fever goes…