Jess Concedes

So If you've heard even 50% of my stories, you've heard about my bout with hantavirus during the summer of 2003. I was dating an Ultimate Frisbee player at the time, and he hooked me up with a sweeeeet deal on a summer sublet in the Ultimate Frisbee House. The house was... well, it was... how do I put it.... The house was filthy. Filthy filthy filthy. Absolutely disgustingly filthy. There were visible mouse droppings everywhere: along the back of the counter in the kitchen, all over the basement, probably pulverized and embedded in the carpeting. Everywhere. I even got to meet a friendly little pooper in person one evening as I did organic chemistry pre-labs in my stuffy un-air-conditioned room. It was a flash of fuzzy soft gray and a segmented tail; it scurried by my foot and under my desk to an unknown hiding place. If it weren't disgusting and horrifying, I might even say it was cute. But it wasn't cute. It was digusting and horrifying.

Anyway, the sweeeeet deal on the sublet turned out to be worth less than I paid. I was sharing a bathroom with three boys, all undergrad athlete types. Needless to say, the bathroom was just about the filthiest thing I'd ever seen. About five showers into my stay, I'd had enough, and decided to give the bathroom a nice cleaning. These weren't the kinds of roommates you have a hold-off battle with. So I went to CVS and bought Clorox and rubber gloves and a bucket, and a scrubber thing. I did not, to my misfortune, buy a mask. When I got home, I changed into my grungiest shorts and tank top and settled onto my hands and knees in the filthy little bathroom, and cleaned like I had never cleaned before.

A couple of hours later, I found myself in a sparkling bathroom that didn't have beige tiling, as I had thought, but rather white. I didn't allow to myself wonder how long it had been since the actual surfaces of that bathroom had been exposed to fresh air, what exactly had caused the smelly discolorations, what had contributed to the grime and slime... Instead, I looked around with pride, took an inaugural shower, and went about my business for the rest of the night.

I awoke in the middle of the night with probably the worst case of odynophagia of my life. It was even worse than the time I had a varicella lesion in my throat. It kept me up, and soon other parts of my nasopharynx joined the party: by morning, my nose was stuffy and running, my sinuses felt awful, and I developed some kind of cough. It was an upper respiratory nightmare. I called Student Health the first thing in the morning, which is something people only do when they feel an illness is dire: this one was. I got an appointment for early in the afternoon, and went. The nurse practitioner who saw me laughed heartily at my "I cleaned the shower and inhaled an infectious agent" story, and promptly prescribed a painkiller, a decongestant, and a cough suppressant. She said I had a bad cold that was going around; she'd even had it, herself.

But I knew it in my bones: those mice were reservoirs for something, and their droppings had infested the floor of that bathroom with it, and I had unknowingly caused aeration of it, and I had inhaled it as I cleaned, and it had colonized my nasopharynx, and I was sick with it! And what infectious disease is spread via aerosolization of mice droppings? HANTAVIRUS, that's what.

So that, my friends, is why I have told you that I had freakin' Hantavirus during the summer of '03.

But I am now a sad little memory machine (not a good one, either) in the final months of The First Year of Medical School. And as a current memorizer of Microbiology, I have been forced to eat breath swallow DROWN IN everything that causes any kind of anything in human beings. So I just yesterday learned about Hantavirus, in all its glory. And so today I concede to you, dear friends, that perhaps yes maybe just possibly: I did not have Hantavirus, as I had originally hypothesized. The symptoms weren't right, the time course wasn't right, and, okay, I probably wouldn't have actually survived.


...but now I'm totally absolutely convinced it was a fungal infection. Stay tuned, I'm currently studying to figure out which fungus.