Fearing contagion

In the previous post, I alluded to anxiety about the possibility of actually having contracted Ebola. But I haven’t given you a sense of how, exactly, that’s played out over my first couple of days here.

It starts pretty much as soon as I wake up. Does my head hurt? Do my eyes hurt? Does my stomach hurt? Was that poop (sorry) maybe kind of suspiciously loose? Luckily, there is the thermometer, my objective friend. I pop it into my mouth many times a day, and so far, it has continued to tell me to calm down. A good thing, because both of the past afternoons around 1:30-3:00, I have felt REALLY WEIRD. Anxious – irritable – almost tearful – tired – barely able to tolerate anyone else. Both times, it passed – once after a nap, once just over the course of a meal with friends. I still have no idea what it was (is this the antimalarials?).

When I look at the bigger picture, however, everything seems more or less okay. First of all, “feeling weird” is one of the few things that ISN’T a symptom of Ebola. Beyond that – I have an excellent appetite – my poop, in fact, really isn’t that loose – I’ve had enough energy to go out two nights running – and the thermometer continues to tell me I’m okay.

I don’t know if I’m lying to myself, but what I’m most worried about doesn’t actually feel like it’s my personal health. I’m sure that would quickly become my focus were I in fact to test positive – but in the meantime, I’m much more concerned about what it would mean to my friends and to the city of Geneva. Both the friends (actively, personally) and the city (more passively) have been generous enough to take me in, and the idea that I might reward this by causing my friend to have to deal with a decontamination team in her apartment doing god knows what with all of her lovely stuff, or by setting off a panic in this usually very cool city, kind of torments me. If anyone else were then actually to become infected because of me (which I truly believe is impossible, but, hey – when has that ever stopped someone from worrying?), I can’t imagine what I’d feel.

Happily – let me just underline this one more time – there is in fact no suggestion whatsoever that I have Ebola!!! Just reading this post, you can kind of see the rabbit hole one can go down when one starts to think about it too much. But, for the moment, everything is going according to plan, and neither my friends nor the city have anything to reproach me with. And, in fact, tonight it felt a bit like something “clicked.” Can’t say what it was (maybe writing this helped?), but some time this evening I started to feel a bit more like – myself. We’ll see how it feels tomorrow morning, but maybe – just maybe – it means I’ve taken one more step back toward “home.”