Reflections after being felled by a humble mosquito

Together with Werty Heng, I run a newsletter project called Morning Assembly— a nutritious serving of slow news, delivered to your inbox every weekend. (We try!) We offer productivity hacks, long-reads, tweets and jokes for the intellectually curious. You can see previous issues here.

This weekend, I wrote about my two-week long entanglement with dengue fever and my reflections about productivity and rest. Dengue fever also explains my prolonged absence from LinkedIn — I've missed work very much!

As a sneak peak for tonight's edition going live in a few hours, I'm sharing my reflection here for the LinkedIn community. For the full contents of the newsletter, or to get more of this in your email, please subscribe and share it with anyone who would dig our vibe.

Exactly two weeks ago today, I woke up hot and damp with sweat, ill-rested after a night of tossing and turning and wild dreams. I was running a slight fever, my pink thermometer told me. My first thought was: “Is my neighbourhood gas station (the only place I’ve been in the last two weeks outside of home) somehow a new coronavirus cluster?” The second was: “Should I just take some paracetamol and then keep working? It’s just a low grade fever, maybe I’ll get over it by the afternoon.”

Taking the day off turned out to be the right choice, and the only real choice I had on hindsight. I haven’t been back to work since.

My temperature started climbing further, and in the next several days persistently clung onto the 39-40 degree mark (that’s up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit for American friends). Waking up after bizarre dreams with damp hair the smell of my scalp became unpleasant day-to-day reality. I slept up to 19 hours a day, in part to evade the overwhelming sense of exhaustion and bone-deep aches racking my body.

Thankfully, I did not have coronavirus. Instead, I had dengue fever, caused by a virus spread by the bite of a mosquito. It’s peak season for the disease in Singapore now - the city-state is seeing more than 500 new cases a week.

In the next few days, I’d croak to Werty between naps about the pressing need for dengue fever victims to form psychological support groups to cope with the debilitating pains and discomfort caused by the virus.  It isn’t dubbed break-bone fever for no reason, after all. But to be honest with you and myself, the real trauma was psychological, not physiological. 

After all, one small silver lining was how regular the timeline for dengue fever symptoms were, my doctor told me: A fixed number of days of high fever, followed by a certain number of days of my blood platelet counts dropping, an itchy red rash and then days - or even weeks - of listlessness and fatigue.

This means I knew my suffering was of a finite and predictable duration, though the uncertainty lay in whether I’d develop dangerous complications. Thankfully, I did not. But the incredible exhaustion I’ve been experiencing as I recover has been very disorienting — and has given me reason to reflect.

That weekend before coming down with dengue, I’d proudly noted that I’d been able to increase my push-up count while on lockdown, after regular after-work yoga and HIIT sessions. I was riding high at work with a list of fresh new ideas to implement in the next few weeks - and was excited to get cracking in the week ahead. I’d found renewed energy in side projects on the weekends… and then it all came toppling down, like a Jenga tower knocked over abruptly, or a laptop restarting after a hard reset.

My dengue episode feels like a short circuit — like the power went out in my life, the light’s just flickering back on, and I’m cleaning up now. And I’m frankly shocked by how much the longest illness in my life so far has set me back.

Even 30 minutes of beginner yoga tires me out. I’m still finding myself drained of energy at random hours of the day. Yesterday, I had to ask my brother what became of the controversy around Elon Musk baby’s name - which the social media world probably has mostly moved on from by now, but was all the rage when I was last energetic enough to read the news. When I return to work tomorrow, I will discover what more I have missed.

I’m painfully aware that all I had was a bout of dengue for two weeks - a relatively short disruption in the grand scheme of things. Others have suffered longer for tougher reasons. But I’m paying attention to the fact that this short episode of losing control over my routine has rankled me so much.

We pride ourselves on a go-go-go culture. I freely admit that as an above-average ambitious person, I’m a subscriber to the belief that achieving more, getting more done, is better. But it was an important lesson to learn how fragile our day-to-day life really is, held together by the invisible but often forgotten glue of good health — and so easily upended by the bite of a mosquito that can breed in stagnant water the size of a small coin. (PSA: Here's how you can help fight dengue fever)

In between illness and full recovery now I sit, each day marvelling at little steps towards full strength: the plank that feels just a bit easier than yesterday’s, being able to sit at my desk for longer and longer each time. Having operated at the peak of my energy levels for so long, to be brought to its trough feels like a fitting lesson during the world’s greatest lockdown: to taste the good fortune of health, truly appreciate just how much I am truly capable of doing each and every day, and to experience the joy of awakening and regaining what was once lost.

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