Ross River Virus!

Ross River Virus! Oh yeah! I know it well! They say it's different for everybody, so I can only talk about what happened to me, but since Brisbane and environs are now expecting the usual post-flood plague of mosquito-borne diseases, including RRV,  I'm putting this out there to give people a rough idea of what to expect ...  and hopefully to inspire them to do everything possible to avoid those pesky mosquitoes and so NOT get this unspeakably horrible disease.

Right up front, let me tell you that this disease is something you don't want to get, so I'm offering this advice: Be afraid! Be very afraid!!!

I caught RRV back in ... 1997? During Townsville's mosquito plague after our Cyclone Justin floods, anyway!  And this disease lasted until ... mmm? ... today? Yup, I still feel the effects now and again!  In fact, 14 years later, whenever I come down with something else, this hideous opportunistic disease returns with a flourish to add to my misery! 

So let's say it again: Be afraid! Be very afraid!!!

It's caused by a mosquito that has previously bitten ... something! They say they don't know what the intermediate host is. But I know!  There is only one possibility because I was there and saw what I saw and so know what I know ...

What happened was we'd been flood-bound for days but the waters had finally receded, and my two rottweilers, Joop and Rosk, had been increasingly stir-crazy and annoying, so late in the afternoon I took them for a much-needed walk. No biggie!  Just our usual brisk stroll in the nearby park ... but this time we got there to discover the park was still underwater and all over this new lake were flocks of wild ducks! Several different species! All flown from someplace else on their annual migration!  "Ah, this is so beautiful!" I thought the very second before ...

... yeah, yeah, you can guess what happened! You know, since I've talked about them before, both my beautiful darlings weighed more than I did - Rosk 67ks and Joop 92ks - which meant I had no chance of ever restraining them when they didn't want to be restrained. Usually on our walks, since they were both sweethearts, they seldom challenged my grip - which was particularly nice of them since rotties were originally bred by butchers to pull bull carcasses and so, like huskies, pulling comes naturally and instinctively - so holding them was never usually a problem. In fact, before the leash laws came into effect, in 1997, they always walked to heel beside me, one on each side, and that's what they continued to do after I was forced to walk them on leashes!

But not that afternoon!  The instant they saw the ducks it was mad frantic barking and then, WHOOSH!!, they were gone!  I tried to hold them back, honestly, mainly because the new leash laws were strenuously enforced with massive fines, but didn't stand a chance. And so there's me running desperately behind them, shouting and grabbing ... but good luck with that! Yup, for more than two hours, I was running madly up and down that lake, grabbing them only to lose them again, slipping and sliding in the mud and water, filthy and completely humiliated, as these vile dogs took it upon themselves to individually terrorise each of those ducks in turn!

Thankfully no one in the vicinity called the police.  Guess they sympathised with my plight! Or maybe they were laughing too hard!

It was well after dark when my dogs returned to me of their own free will, all tired and happy, and, since there were mosquitoes everywhere, there was barely an inch of me that wasn't red raw from itchy bites.

So that's how I know what causes this disease. Since we were always so mosquito-careful, with dozens of citronella candles burning everywhere, that's the only opportunity I could have caught RRV so we can safely say the intermediate host is WILD DUCK!!!

So what happened next?  Looking back, the first symptoms were a general malaise coupled with a complete failure of joy and humour!  Normally, my life is so endlessly absurd I find reasons to laugh everywhere, but not during the RRV incubation period ... which is really sad because our lives were, at that point in time, completely ridiculous!

Oh yeah! Those were vivid times! Not only was my garden completely out of control and requiring constant work, we had a Japanese exchange student come to stay with us - several days after the incident with the ducks - who was ... HIDEOUS!!  I can't find another word to describe her.

Back then, we were part of a world-wide exchange program and so hosted many lovely teenagers from around the world as they experienced a month of high-schooling in the tropics and I enjoyed them all very much.

But not Shino!  Shino was evil incarnate! Shino was the epitome of trouble-making, evil-minded, dumb, self-important, rude, nasty-nasty-nasty, spoiled-rotten brat and how I didn't end up beating her continues to amaze me.

In fact, everyone, including the police, constantly said "Why haven't you beaten her?" and "How can you NOT beat her?" and "Look, don't worry about her parents.  She needs it so badly, they'll probably thank you!" and a kindly "Beat her and we'll turn a blind eye!" from the exchange program, and even, from the police, "If you beat her and there's any fuss, call on us and we'll say we investigated and found nothing in it." and she was so ghastly, I thanked them for their offers and concern.

Apart from being the nastiest and rudest person I have ever known - and I mean that most sincerely - Shino's main party-trick was phoning the police to report me. She was frightened of Keith so thankfully left him alone, but I was fair game so, yup, for that horrible month, every day sicker, more feverish and more in pain than the last, most afternoons I'd return home from a hard day's teaching to find police cars in front of our house and Shino throwing a spectacular temper tantrum as she reported my latest heinous crime to them.

Like, the first crime she reported was me lighting citronella candles! I did it, as any normal person would know, as our nightly mosquito repellent on the veranda, but according to Shino they were proof I was a practising Satanist intending to kill her as a sacrifice to my evil dark lord!

Never has any moment of my life more deserved a huge uproarious bout of roaring laughter, but for some strange reason I couldn't find any humour in it and, in fact, felt it more like a nightmare. "I'm a teacher!" I pleaded with the cops.  "I can't have anything like this on my record!"

"Don't worry about it." was the cheerful reply.  "We're only going to have big belly laughs about this back at the station!" and then they switched over to a much more important topic:  Joop! My male rottweiler! 92 kilos of gentle amber-eyed rottweiler perfection! These particular cops bred rotties and they sooo wanted Joop, who they said was better looking than even Sam and Bear, the two famous rottie studs every breeder in NQ normally aspired to, on their breeding program!

So that's undoubtedly the reason why the cops continued to drop by even after they knew Shino was completely mad. Yup, after she saw the painting in my study, given to me by an aboriginal artist friend, Deborah Dank, of The Rainbow Serpent and took this aboriginal symbol of creativity as again proof I was a practising Satanist, I had two police cars and four cops drop by to get that report. And when she found, in my locked bedroom, my sketches of Keith in the nude, and reported me as a Satanist Pornographer, there was an endless stream of police visits where, after Shino's screaming temper tantrum subsided, we'd go out to the garden for a serious round of rottie inspection and long hard questioning about about my rotties' pedigrees.

Oh, and when the investigating officers discovered that Rosk, not nearly as beautiful as Joop, was the litter-sister of Bob, the NQ rottweiler who was a legend in police circles for his human-level problem-solving intelligence - and had recently been sold off to a high ranking policeman/breeder down south for A$1,800.00 - there was no stopping the constant stream of police officers from the entire region who wished to investigate my heinous crimes.

But the Shino-nonsense went, on and on, until - despite my rottie's pedigrees - even the police had enough!! "Please beat her!" the nice policemen begged us.  "We are sick to death of this evil bitch, so please do whatever you can to force her to stop bugging us!"

So you get why, since her police reports were barely the tip of the iceberg of the constant horror she inflicted on us, this was no time for sense-of-humour failure.  Normally, I could have coped PLUS PLUS PLUS and loved every minute, but not on this occasion.  Instead of laughing, I just got angrier and angrier until - and please don't blame me for this - when she very presumptively and rudely ordered me to take her clothes off the line, I felt this empowering sense of rage and, just like The Incredible Hulk, and despite having the most intensively painful hands, I actually hauled the huge Hills Hoist out of the ground and aimed it right at her as a missile!

Got her too!  Knocked her out! Man, that felt so good! And, yeah, yeah, when she came to, all cut up and battered, and raced in to ring the police, they arrived - tee hee! - only to give me a big hearty pat on the back and said "On ya, mate!!!", and they did it right in front of her too!

Yee ha!  Go go, Townsville Police Force!


But let's get back to the real story!

With the RRV plague, no one knew what was happening but everyone knew something was wrong. Too many of us were coming down with mystery ailments. As a highschool teacher, you deal with close to three hundred people a day and practically everyone was talking about something being wrong with them; all different things, sure, but most of us definitely knew we had something! And, sure, there was a Dengue epidemic happening in the region, but we all knew this definitely wasn't Dengue.

RRV was virtually unknown to the general public back then and because it presents in so many different ways, people were fronting up to their doctors with gout and others with desperately painful muscles that felt like they've been ripped out of sockets, and joints that felt like someone had stuck a knife in, and still others turned up with bones so painful they were convinced they've broken lots of them.

Me? I too had never heard of RRV and couldn't understand why I felt like I'd been in a car accident that had broken every bone in my body.  I thought maybe it was Shino-induced stress and just took aspirin for it ... until the moment I got the full dose of poly-arthritis in my hands.

Man, that was amazing! It happened so fast I felt like a werewolf under a full moon!

Seriously, you should have seen that first bout.  My garden was such a mess that, despite feeling very feverish and foggy-headed and with extremely painful hands, I was out there digging out the masses of weeds, when my spade hit a rock under the earth, jarring my hands ... and that's when it happened.

Right before my eyes, my fingers began to curl inwards, and then the bones in the back of my hands began to protrude and twist into the most bizarre shapes, and then my hands themselves began to curl and twist into these inhuman claws, and then they twisted around and curled themselves up right against my wrists in a position they normally couldn't reach.

You have never seen anything like it EVER!  If it hadn't been so unbearably painful, it would have been rather fun! But that's when I realised something was definitely seriously wrong with me so I made my way down to my doctor.

"I think I've developed arthritis!" I said to him, holding up my vile freakishly-twisted claws.

"Mmmm, yes, a very serious bout indeed!" he said, trying to hide his smile.  "And how long did it take you to develop this bout?"

"About 10 to 15 minutes."

And that's when he burst into unsympathetic roaring laughter. "That 40 years of arthritis you have in those hands." he eventually settled down enough to say.  "It's not possible to get 40 years of arthritis in 10 to 15 minutes."

That was when he picked up the bottle he had right in front of him - he must have been doing this for days - and said "This is most irresponsible of me to do this without doing blood tests first, but those tests will take days and I can see how much pain you're in, and besides, I'm so convinced I know what you've got, I'm going to give you a pill ... so let's diagnose you this way: if one of these pills gets rid of your bout of arthritis, what you have is definitely Ross River Virus."  and took out a tablet and, saying, "This is always fun to watch." he gave it to me with a glass of water.

I took it and it was indeed fun to watch. Within only minutes, the pill took effect and my 40 years of arthritis, which took about15 minutes to form, took only about three to unform. And my sense of humour returned too, so when "Fun, huh!" my doctor said, I laughed along with him!

I don't recall the name of that drug, but I only wish all drugs worked that well.  And needless to say, despite my normal refusal to take any medicines, pain-relief makes hypocrites of us all so I bought a jar of these suckers - expensive but who cared - and took them exactly as my doctor ordered.

And whenever I stopped taking them, I'd go all werewolf-hands again ...  so I stayed on them for many months. And continued to take them as the bouts continued over that first year, until they suddenly stopped having the same effect and I was back onto the aspirin for the pain, as I have been for the years since.

Yup, years!  At first they said this disease would only last months, and then, when it continued, that it would last a year, and then that figure rose to three years, and then to five and then to nine, until here I am, 14 years later, still on close intimate terms with RRV, because whenever I come down with anything else, like with this current cold I've got, I feel like I've been in a bone-smashing car-accident and I werewolf up ...

... although I never feel it as badly nor look as freakishly-clawy as I did with that first ever bout.

So that's how I discovered Ross River Virus!  It's painful and horrible and you really really REALLY don't want to catch it. So please take my advice and Be afraid!  Be very afraid!  

Oh, and stay away from DUCKS!!!