Damned Dengue

I would like to get him alive. I would like to shove a thermometre up his ass and take his rectal temperature for no particular reason. Then I would like to inject him with the mosquito version of the evil things that happen when a dengue (pronounced “dengee” by the Oxford Dictionary and “dengoo” by Indian television) infested human bites a mosquito.

Then as he gets out of his car,fever raging through his body,his legs so weak he cannot walk the stairs,I would make him wait in bloody Casualty while his wife tries to figure out what forms to fill. “Ok,Sister Philipose (name changed to protect her identity from swarms of revenge-seeking blood-suckers),let us pleeesu run wen IV,and make sure it is a thinnu veinu,so the bleddy thing thromboses over the weekend.” Then after wen hour,as his head still burns with fever,and various white-clad voodoo women have stuck gauges of needles into his thinnu veinus,his wife finally arrives clutching the precious admission form like the Commonwealth Torch.

Now that money has exchanged hands,or plastic has been swiped,they have permission to wheel him,vision blurring,into an elevator,stainless steel ceiling,through a corridor,white,dotted false-ceiling,into a small cell in Alcatraz,white antiseptic ceiling with slow whirring fan,just like you see in all those mosquito infested,movies on Vietnam. Then they roll the poor miserable,eyeball creaking,bastard onto the clean white sheets,while a new set of happy women start their own personal hunt for thinnu veinus.

For five days they will keep him there. At 4 am every morning a little woman will knock on his door,grinning doubtlessly under her green mask. “Good morning… Bledd…” Then she will poke around in his now freely hemorrhaging venous system and draw fresh blood to carry in her little glass test tubes to the evil laboratory in the unseen dungeons where scores of cackling scientists will no doubt cackle uproariously at what they see under their microscopes.

“Cackle cackle cackle… platelet count is now 65,000…” “Cackle cackle cackle… platelet count is now 28,000… tomorrow I think it will reach the tarjjet… 20,000… then we can start transfusions… CACKLE CACKLE!”

“Cackle cackle… WHAT?!… it has started rising? Now it is 48,000? But,but… that is impossible… quick,find another dengue infested human,and a good sick one,this time we will get him to bite under the carotid…”

And then hopefully they will keep him for another 85 days since that is a nice round number and a good multiple of the five days that I was subjected to. And they will feed him slightly murky soup. And make him piss into a bottle so they can measure how much he pisses at each pop (450 ml in one heroic squirt still holds the land-speed record). And they will wake him up at 4 am every morning with those gleeful words… “Good morning… bledd!”

Cackle cackle cackle!

(Contact the columnist at adipochas@yahoo.com)