Chikungunya Fever

It's never fun getting sick in Indo because a lot of the time it's a guessing game as to what's wrong with you.  Luckily, we are blessed with 1 doctor, 3 nurses and 1 midwife within the Western community here who are available to help. Whenever something is wrong, we usually see one of them before going to the local doctor or hospital.  But when we got sick last week unfortunately for us, it was Spring Break and most of them were out of town. On Friday,  Pete and Liv came down with a fever. I can handle fevers. Give tylenol and fever goes away.  But then they got a rash.

  This rash.  Both of them.  All over their bodies.  Nice.

I'm not so familiar with rashes and I wasn't quite sure what to do - do you give benedryl? Cover it with calamine lotion? That's what my mom did when I was little. So instead we waited to see if anything else developed. The next day, I got the rash. Awesome. So since it seemed to be spreading, we called the 1 Western nurse who was in town, but after she saw us she wasn't sure what it was.

We called another nurse who graciously helped us while on vacation at the beach and she unofficially diagnosed us with Rubella. All the symptoms matched: fever, body aches, rash...but we kept asking how could 3 of us get it since we've been vaccinated?  But with Rubella, it's contagious for a week before and a week after and is very dangerous for pregnant ladies so we hibernated at home.  

We had emailed a doctor in the States for help and he emailed us back and he suggested that it might be Chickungunya (Chick-un-gun-ya) Fever. Never heard of it and truthfully it sounded a little scary.  I didn't even want to read the description.  He also mentioned going to an Infectious Disease Clinic. Not sure if they even have those in Indonesia!  But after checking the symptoms, they matched up closer than Rubella, and we re-diagnosed ourselves with Chick-a-whatever  Fever.  

So we thought it would be smart to try to get a Rubella test today just to make sure we're not contagious, being that one of Livvy's classmates' mom is pregnant and we don't want to endanger the life of her baby.  So Pete got the Rubella test and it came back negative!

His and Livvy's rashes have already gone away, the only lasting symptom is joint swelling and pain. He and I had to take off our wedding rings because our hands are swollen and we feel like were 70 years old because our joints are so stiff and sore. 

It can sometimes get so bad that people who have this are known to crawl around on the floor because it hurts to badly to walk. Luckily ours wasn't that bad. We were feeling pretty normal except the itchy rash and joint pain.  We made ourselves busy with a few trips to McD's drivethru, walks in the neighborhood and a handful of new, cheap Chinese-made toys:)

For those of you who homeschool, like my amazing sister-in-law or if you like to research weird tropical diseases you can find more info on Chickungunya Fever here or here.