After a long illness it’s as though the whole world appears again in ghastly grey newness, ready to be loathed afresh. So it has been recently after a seemingly-endless bout with that favorite tropical friend and companion, dengue.

How did it began. It was a Monday. How fitting. Even if it was a public holiday. The girlfriend wanted to go for a picnic down by the river. Bah, I said, I hate picnics, and off we went.

An hour’s drive later, we found ourselves among screaming kids, nowhere to sit, flies (and, unnoticed, mosquitoes) galore, and an adjacent paddock full of testicular-challenged colts with what can only be described as a bowl cut for their tails.

Great. We made short work of the sandwiches we’d brought, looked rather sheepishly at each other as yet another ear-splitting yelp of some small humanoid rodent caused us both to wince, and simultaneously began packing up to leave.

So much for that idea, we both said at practically the same time, and went for an ice cream at a nearby shopping center to soothe the annoyance.

The day ended on a real upbeat note, it was the same day my brother emailed to say he had been kidnapped, and finished very late after a telephone conversation with the Colombian anti-kidnapping police (see other post).

The kidnapping incident dragged on, and with it a not entirely unexpected general sense of malaise. It was to be expected; I was under a lot of pressure, it would go away soon.

Except it didn’t.

The kidnapping situation resolved itself, but the general sense of malaise continued — runny nose, slight cough, tiredness. Then the following Monday, seven days after the picnic, I went to bed with a racing heartbeat. It was most unusual. I had just said goodbye to a roommate who was leaving to teach English in Saudi Arabia, and though I was fond of her, I could certainly see no need to be so excited about her departure (she’s well into her 50s).

I tried to relax and finally got to sleep. I set the alarm for 7:30 to force myself to get up and do some work in the morning before the usual annoyances began; 7:30 came and went, and when I rolled over and saw 11:30 on the alarm clock, I knew something was seriously awry.

For one thing, I was freezing cold. Before midday rolled around I was huddled up in a jumper and beanie, and shivering uncontrollably. This in tropical Cali, where ordinary citizens break out the scarves if the low dips below a chilly 20C.

This continued for several days. I soaked my sheets. I soaked all my clothes. The sweating and shivering found no end, and I was soon badly dehydrated.

Food became something of a joke. Poke it a little, and maybe it’ll move. The classic symptoms of dengue include “anorexia”, which is a far worse situation that I ever realized. Now, I’ve done the running half-marathons on half a piece of toast and glass of water thing before, but this was totally different. This was sitting down to a meal feeling so hungry you could eat a horse, taking two bites of a bowl of cereal and feeling convinced you would explode if you ate another bite.

Suffice it to say during my seven days of dengue I lost a fair bit of weight.

The overwhelming primary symptom I have so far failed to mention is the eye pain. Imagine your worst headache ever, like a nuclear bomb going off behind your eyeballs. Only the pain. Just. Never. Ends.

And you can’t take aspirin. Tried that. Got slapped by the doctor for it (plus it didn’t do any good). Aspirin is a blood thinner and can actually turn a case of dengue into dengue hemmorhagic fever, a potentially fatal complication. The doctor gave me acetomenaphin, in fact the only drug of any kind he gave me, as there is no treatment for dengue besides bed rest and rehydration salts.

So let’s talk about that doctor. My girlfriend dragged me in to see him, and boy am I glad she did. He charged the two of us 45,000 pesos (about USD $20) for a 50-minute private consultation. On a Saturday morning. Before he was about to go on a week’s holiday.

There is, of course, no treatment for dengue. Dehydration is the biggest killer; I spent a couple of days after that sipping on a disgusting rehydration solution of salts and glucose. It got me peeing again, though, so thank goodness for small mercies.

The final coup de grâce as the dengue took its leave was it turned my entire body pink. Only on the pigmented parts — the soles of my feet stayed white — but it was like a bad sunburn covering my entire body. It’s as though in a final act of vengeance the dengue decided to explode a fine layer of surface capillaries over the entire surface of my skin. My skin itched; my lips peeled; but I felt better.

One of the fascinating things about dengue is that it is a new disease. According to the CDC, it appeared in 1779-80 almost simultaneously across the tropical world.

Another striking factoid is that the mosquito that carries the virus bites during the daytime only (ignore any dodgy wikipedia entries that say otherwise). This makes it much more difficult to defend against than, say, malaria, where simply sleeping with a quality mosquito net is generally ample protection against infection.

It appears that Latin America is in for a serious epidemic of dengue. A brief scouring of the online news shows that in the last two years alone there has been a massive upswing of dengue cases throughout Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America as far south as northern Argentina. (Of course altitude offers good protection, mosquitoes are unable to live above roughly 2000m, making breathless La Paz immune from a dengue outbreak.)

So what does this mean for you intrepid visitors to Colombia? Bogota and Medellin are at sufficient altitude that dengue is not a worry, but does this mean you should avoid the coastal regions, and Cali too?

Well, it should be pointed out that sanitation in the cities in Colombia is excellent (you can, and I do, drink the water), and that I contracted dengue in a rural setting outside of Cali. You are probably at greater risk on the Caribbean coast, especially in the poorer parts of the country.

But hey. Risk is what makes life worth living. Way I look at it, I’m now immune to one of the four types of dengue in the world. Three more to go, and I won’t have to worry about dengue ever again. Or the complications of a re-infection will kill me, and I won’t have anything more to worry about, period.

Either way, I reckon I’m set.