The Sickest I've Ever Been

bacterial inflammation in my throat, scraped continually by the coughing? Maybe the time I was hospitalized with a terrible infection or reaction of some kind while an infant? What about that bout of viral meningitis a few years ago, when I did all the wrong things and still survived to write about it today? Well, to be fair, that’s probably it, and I will definitely write about it sometime, but you know what? Let’s do this one about the time I caught hepatitis A from a monkey. (I was unable to find a picture of one of the monkeys I was working with -- it was long, long before digital photography and I hadn't yet developed my habit of always having a camera with me, so I have far fewer photos from those days than I would like. I've illustrated this post with a picture I took of one of the slow lorises I also worked with at the time.)

     I was just out of high school and had a volunteer job at a major zoo. Although much of the rest of my life was a total shit-show, this was one of the most rewarding periods of my life. I loved working behind the scenes with the zoo animals, getting to know them in ways more intimate and less impersonal than staring at each other across an expanse of fabulously-designed, naturally-appearing habitat. Not that this is always a barrier to communication; I had a membership to this zoo and would spend as much of my life there as I could get away with, usually going there straight from school until closing time before I graduated, and for three or four full days a week after that, in addition to wandering the grounds after work in the blissful pre-opening solitude (but not quietude: the gibbons and howler monkeys and peacocks and lions and just about everyone else would get to shouting about being alive right around that time), so I got to know a few of the animals I didn’t work with directly pretty well.

     One of my “pals” at the time was a little guy I never got to meet close up, and to be honest I’m not even sure whether he loved me or hated me, but whatever, he sure was into me. When I left my volunteer job at around sunrise I’d walk down into the zoo grounds, and along the way was a building in which the breeding colony of pygmy marmosets rioted in simulated natural conditions. This one magnificent stud of a tiny little monkey would, if he caught sight of me through the high window, plaster himself to the glass and stare at me, making faces. Every now and then he would pound on the glass with one minuscule fist. He’d keep it up as long as I’d stand there. Go figure.

     Two other critters stand out for me at the moment; I’m sure I’ll talk about more, like the echidna, some other time. One of these was a warthog. I’m not super up on warthog behavior (to my shame) but it sure as heck looked like he was in love with me. I would often sit on some rocks above his enclosure and eat my lunch or just watch the world go by, and if he noticed me there he’d come galloping across the realistic savanna to a position by the fence. There, he would alternate going back and forth in a floating trot that would send a dressage horse into seizures of envy with standing staring at me, ears pricked, uttering adorable little grunts. Then he would back way up, drop to his knees, and trot with his back legs, shuffling his way comically toward me while shoveling up a strip of dirt with his face. He’d stand, the pile of earth dribbling down from both sides of his snout, and grunt again, eyes closed, before flopping over on his side and watching me. Rinse and repeat. I really liked that pig.

     The other was an owl. She was an African Milky Eagle Owl, and so was, at 66 cm tall, rather large. I got to know her simply because she wanted to get to know me. She and her mate roosted in a corner of an aviary that was accessible from an upper-level walking path where almost nobody went. I found them roosting there one day, not three meters from me, asleep and beautiful beyond belief. Stood there watching them through the wire for a while, and the female woke up. She studied me, motionless, for some time and then went back to sleep. I started going up there every day and would sit on the ground up close to the wire watching them sleep or watch me. You probably can’t get that close to the walls these days (and rightly so!); things were generally more permissive that way back then. It was a week or so before she decided to make friends.

     From the perch it was possible for the birds to step down onto a concrete, rock-appearing ledge against the wire where I was sitting. When the female walked over and did that, and stood less than an arm’s length from me, she was as tall as I was sitting down. We were eye-to-eye. She studied me, I studied her, and then she lifted one immense, terrifying foot and grabbed the wire, relaxed, and, still holding the wire, half closed her eyes and fluffed up a little. I couldn’t not do it. Keeping a wary  eye on her gigantic head, eyes larger than my own, beak capable of biting one of my fingers off effortlessly, I slowly reached out and touched one of those talons, each as thick as my pinkie. Immediately, that huge bird went kind of limp, eyes fluttering, pushing that claw my way. So I massaged her talons. That was what she wanted. Who am I to refuse such a thing? I went back a lot, and she always wanted a nice claw-rub. Always her left foot for some reason.

     But I’m supposed to be talking about getting sick.

     My duties, which I’ll describe in more detail at other times, for example when relating the pre-dawn morning when I was interviewed by two members of the US Secret Service while waiting for a slender loris to give birth, included cleaning the habitats. These monkeys were not in a simulated jungle, nor did this bother them in the slightest. Their enclosures consisted of enormous aviary-like enclosures, large enough to comfortably support a functioning troop of lion-tailed macaque monkeys in psychological comfort, studded with constructions made of whole trees, sleeping platforms, ropes, water fountains. To clean one, I would first prepare and distribute their food in another, setting out a feast of monkey chow, fresh fruits and vegetables liberally sprinkled with vitamin powders, and dishes of luscious meal worms. Moving the monkeys was never a problem; by the time I finished this task, all 20 or so of them would be clinging to the nearest wall of the other run, drooling. I simply needed to use the pullies to open the doors at either end of the connecting run, wait for all of the monkeys to be on the other side, and close the doors again. Then I would power-wash and bleach the enclosure they’d just left before scrubbing out the much smaller attached runs where monkeys could be isolated if necessary. At this time these latter were open so that monkeys wanting a little seclusion could go in there, and the males habitually marked the walls with pretty much any bodily fluid you could care to mention. They were monkeys, after all.

     This time, like always, I put the plastic suit over my clothes, pulled the drawstrings of the hood tight, donned very thick yellow rubber household gloves, and got to work scrubbing. It wasn’t 20 minutes before I discovered a piece of the wire dividing the run from the next one which had come loose – by stabbing my finger on it, right through the glove.

     The only thing to do about it was sterilize the pinprick wound, report the incident, and wait.

     It was around three weeks later that I started getting ill. One day I woke up feeling like I needed to throw up, and that just got worse for ten days. I did indeed need to vomit and by the second day I couldn’t even keep water down. Day three and I was reeling with fever, unable to walk unaided, and at the doctor’s office. We had a very experienced general practitioner; he took one look at me and got some samples going, gave me some anti-nausea shots, sent me home again. At this time I lived with my grandparents so I was able to lie in bed in a state of abject misery, dragging myself with assistance to the bathroom and back again, and nothing else… at first. I admit it was a real shock the first time I went in there for what seemed to me a normal bowel movement, this being before I ran out of anything to poop out, and when I turned around to flush I saw that it was bone white. The doctor said that was OK, though, if it didn’t last more than a few days. I was too out of it and wretched to care anyway, and I just crawled back under the covers. I could keep one sip of water down at a time so a lot of my life, for the next several days, was occupied with lying semi-propped-up with a bottle of water pressed between my knees and my chest, forcing myself to take one sip every minute or two. I’m pretty sure my grandmother was also mixing an electrolyte replacer into it.

     The difficulty turned up when I was still sick after a few days and we needed to leave for the family Christmas gathering. I recall a lot of whispering and some calls to the doctor, and then my grandparents came in and explained that it would be possible to go if I was willing. They’d planned everything out and I wouldn’t have to walk farther than to the car and then again to my aunt’s front door; I agreed to go for it. Normally I spent the ten-hour drive across the state reading and drawing and looking for wildlife out the windows but this time I was swaddled into the back seat in a sea of comforters, pillows bracing me from all sides, and when I wasn’t dry-retching over a bucket or trying to sip water, I had my eyes pressed tightly shut. I faded from awareness to semi-consciousness in waves but never could sleep.

     Christmas Eve, the day we arrived, the ninth day of my illness, I lay in bed, listening to the revelries in the rest of the house, someone checking on me every little while. I did sleep now, a lot. Christmas, same story. Family members I hadn’t seen in a year crept in to pat my hand, muttering wishes for improvement, and went back out to sing or eat or mingle. There must have been gifts, but I know I didn't open them then and to this day have no idea what I got for Christmas that year. And then all was quiet and I fell asleep again. And then it was the middle of the night, maybe 1 or 2 in the morning, and I was suddenly wide awake and aware that something was different. It took a moment to quantify, in my weakened state, but I realized that I felt clear-headed, and not at all nauseated, and that I was hungrier than I had ever been or ever have been since. I pulled myself up, discovering that I could shuffle along unaided, and made my way to the kitchen to see what there was that someone in no condition to cook and in desperate need of sustenance could rustle up.

     I opened the refrigerator. There before me, quartered and sliced and arranged on a platter, was fully half of the tender smoked turkey my uncle’s family had sent along for the party.

     It remains the best meal of my entire life.

     Recovery was swift after that, and I was back with my non-human buddies in no time.