I’m spoiled to be from a place where I get a mosquito bite maybe once every 3-4 years, but now that I’m in a tropical area and will be traveling around in countries with some possibility of catching a nasty mosquito transmitted disease like dungue, I’m pretty careful of these suckers. So when I suddenly got 5 huge mosquito bites in Singapore, and started to feel sick afterwards, I got pretty worried.
These aren’t the first bites I got on my trip. The first reminder I got of how the rest of the world is home to a lot more biting insects than back home, was on the South Island of New Zealand. I was walking around Lake Wanaka, covered up from head to toe, but still managed to get about 5 sandfly bites around my wrists and ankles. They were annoying and itchy but it was fine.
Then in Sydney, I was there right during a particularly wet period where it had rained pretty much continuously the 2 weeks before I arrived. Mosquitoes were out in full force and unfortunately the hostel I stayed at did not have insect screens (which apparently are not ubiquitous in New Zealand, Australia, nor Singapore despite having flying insects). I woke up to at least 1 bite every morning while I stayed there, and after 3 nights I had to check out early and get an Airbnb because I’m allergic to mosquito bites, and the ones I already got were swelling up to huge red patches up to the size of mangoes on my face, arms and legs. That sucked a lot, but it was just due to the allergy.
But the scariest mosquito experience I had was here in Singapore. I was sitting down playing a street piano in an urban area around sunset. The city is so clean that I forgot to be more careful about mosquitoes since I hadn’t encountered any yet after 5 days, plus it was way too hot to cover up with clothes every day, so I was wearing shorts. All of a sudden I felt a sting on my leg and saw a black mosquito flying away. Bummer, I got bit. I quickly left the area and went to grab some food and explore an indoor mall.
Later when I got home that night, I checked my leg and found that I had not just 1 but 5 mosquito bites on my legs, oh boy. I went to bed hoping that they wouldn’t flare up.
They flared up big time and my legs were mango’d the next day.
So I decided to just take it easy for the day, I couldn’t really walk without my entire leg itching and getting more agitated. Plus I was sore all over and was recovering from getting whiplash from surfing some fake waves and falling a lot at Sentosa Wave House, the day before.
However by late afternoon, I started to get chills and feel something coming on, and before bedtime it hit me hard and I was running a fever. I also had an extremely sore neck to the point where I couldn’t lift my head up from my pillow without pulling myself up by my hair, and had large, extremely itchy red rash-like blotches on my leg. I felt horribly weak, cold and sick, and looking up my symptoms on the internet was the opposite of comforting. I was getting worried that I caught something nasty from the mosquito bites and my symptoms matched some of the symptoms of dungue fever.
Emotionally, I was starting to freak out. Logically, I was trying to convince myself that my symptoms were not indicative of some of my worst fear mosquito diseases:
- My ‘rash’ was just from my mosquito allergy, this exact same rash happens around all my bites pretty much every time I get bit by a mosquito anywhere on this half of the world.
- My ‘stiff neck/back’ was from getting whiplash after some hard falls ‘surfing’ at the wave house the day before. I already had this before the mosquito bites.
- The symptoms do not appear this quickly, it was less than 24hr from when I got bit to when I started feeling sick, whereas the incubation period of dungue is usually a couple days at least.
I couldn’t explain the fever though… which really worried me because it was a clear sign that I had an illness and not just allergies/whiplash/being tired. Even if it was unrelated to the bites, like if I had caught the flu, it would’ve still been devastating for my travel plans because I was set to go to Nepal to trek in the Himalayas in a few days.
I kept browsing the internet for answers which of course did not help. If this was anything from the bites then this was just the beginning and could get a lot worse. As I laid there in my room by myself in a foreign country, on the opposite side of the planet from home, and feeling weaker and sicker by the minute. I started thinking of worst case scenarios: If things got bad how do I find a hospital? How would I even get there? How much would it cost? What if I get REALLY sick out here? What if I get REALLY sick later, somewhere in a place that doesn’t have as good of an infrastructure as Singapore does?
That night, wracked with fever, headaches, muscle aches, itch and chills, alone in a stranger’s house halfway around the world from home, I couldn’t fathom any of the enthusiasm and sense of wonder/challenge that I originally had for my trip, and I wanted nothing more than to just go home. What was I doing all the way out here on my own? Why was I going to Nepal and then India, god what happens if I get sick there!?
In my darkest moment, a ray of hope came through in the most unexpected manner. I won’t go into any details but all of a sudden I rapidly developed clear signs of food poisoning.
God was that a relief, I looked up that food poisoning can trigger a moderate fever which gave me an explanation for the fever, and food poisoning normally just lasts a day or two and is much less serious than the flu or any of the tropical mosquito diseases I could get here. I was still worried, but I prayed for food poisoning as I clutched my stomach. It gave me the strangest sense of comfort as I struggled to sleep through the night.
The next day, my fever had mostly gone down, I was still weak, stomach still wobbly, and had a headache. But I felt like I was on the up and up, so I felt more confident that it was just food poisoning. I dragged myself out of bed and waddled over to a nearby KFC for some mashed potatoes and then spent the rest of the day drinking hot teas and resting in my room.
3 days after I initially fell sick, I was back to normal. Excited about everything again, and walking around eagerly exploring Singapore covered in insect repellent and being much more careful of what I ate. However, it was quite the scare while I was going through it and it’s amazing how fast being sick, bedridden and alone in a foreign country deflates your sense of ‘wander’ and ‘woah’, as it slaps you with a hard dose of reality.