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Not West Nile

Published by on July 3, 2013 | Leave a response

I got bitten by a mosquito last week. If you don’t live in DFW/North Texas, it may seem silly to even mention it, but our area was West Nile Virus Central last summer. Texas had a third of all the cases in the U.S., and the majority of them were in the Metroplex.*

So a mosquito bite is something to notice.

Not only that, but I got bitten while in the area of Tarrant County’s first 2013 West Nile-positive mosquito (they trap and test them, that’s how they know). See?

The good news, of course, is that most people who get West Nile Virus don’t even know it. They never have any symptoms at all. And for a long time, it was only people with underlying health problems or compromised immune systems who developed the serious neuroinvasive form of the disease. But a young man with no health problems died from WNV last summer, so obviously no one is completely safe. The CDC and Texas Department of State Health Services continues to stress that the best way to avoid getting sick is to avoid getting bitten.
So much for that.
Anyway, today I started feeling queasy. And my stomach was a little upset (I won’t go into detail about that part). I remembered my mosquito bite, and quickly looked up the incubation period.
3 to 14 days. Uh-oh.
I was all ready to go into full I’ve-got-the-vapors mode, assuming I was deathly ill and just praying it wouldn’t advance to neurological impairment…when I looked up the symptoms. The mild symptoms are:
  • Fever
  • Headache
  • Body aches
  • Fatigue
  • Back pain
  • Skin rash (occasionally)
  • Swollen lymph glands (occasionally)
  • Eye pain (occasionally)

Uh, nope. Well, except for fatigue, which could definitely be explained by the fact that I stayed up ’til 1:00am reading, then woke up at 6:30 this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. The queasiness could possibly have been caused by that Grande Iced Hazelnut Macchiato I guzzled down in about three minutes flat this afternoon. (I fervently desired caffeine, because of my lack of sleep. Vicious circle, I guess.)

Anyway, it looks like I do not have West Nile Virus, and hoorah for that! I think to celebrate I’ll go enjoy some all-American pizza while we stream 1776.

Happy (and healthy) Independence Day to you and yours. Don’t forget your DEET!

*Total 2012 number of human cases of West Nile in all of Texas was 1,868; in the ten-county DFW area, 966. Total number of human West Nile deaths in Texas was 89, 35 of them in the Metroplex.

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