Mono After My Master's Degree
Picking up a teenage illness at the ripe age of 23 does something to a girl
My diagnosis arrived on Halloween. My costume transformed to Carrie Bradshaw if she had mono, could only hold cigs as a prop, lived in D.C. and wrote for Americans 50-plus.
I look for and write about the truth every day as a journalist, but when the doctor told me I had mono, I knew I was going to avoid digging into where I contracted it. The virus sat idle in my body, festering for six weeks before it erupted in the middle of October. He asked about any exposure—kissing, sharing food or drinks—in early September before the incubation period and handed me a tissue as I teared up. Yes, lots, I thought, only with one person. My mind walked itself through all the possibilities of life before then, of someone I don’t know now. Maybe I didn’t know him then either.
It started on a Thursday with a lump on my neck the size of a golf ball. Then it was a throbbing headache. Friday to Sunday are hard to remember. I worked Friday, shuffling my cinder block feet to get my laptop and retreat back to bed. Every muscle ached and throbbed. I shivered until I was under the blankets, then I’d sweat through my tank top. My stomach was even harder to control. I was eating the most I had in years, but the emptiness never went away. Another $50 DoorDash arrived nearly every night: always chicken tikka masala, extra garlic naan and a mango lassi. Each walk to the lobby required breaks on the couches by the elevator.
A heap of doctor’s appointments and two weeks later, I had an absurdly positive blood test. It was Halloween, and I was to be happy and normal (and Carrie Bradshaw) in front of people from college, something I hadn’t done since early September. I had three coffees to make sure I’d be peppy and spent the night discretely drinking seltzer water.
No alcohol or exercise, or I’d risk rupturing my spleen. Until when? No one could say. No kissing or sharing food or drinks. Until when? No one could say. I tried having one glass of red wine around Thanksgiving but was left with a racing heart and pounding headache. The fatigue let up gradually, partially due to 10 hours of sleep every night, so I eased back into yoga and running. I took the final round of Advil for the headaches and didn’t even know it. My spleen was rock solid and painful to touch until it wasn’t. Eventually, I woke up without a rash or puffy face. My lymph node shrunk from a golf ball to a grape. I got very drunk on New Year’s Eve and my life felt like mine again until February.
I got conjunctivitis. Three times in five weeks. “Could this be from the mono?” I asked the nurse. I watched him type “mono” into Google. The doctor told me maybe. I sighed. These are the reminders of the fall’s pain, which means these are reminders of the end of the summer, too. How much it hurt, how much it still does. I was angry thinking about it in October but got over it quickly. Life went on. I am angry again because my life has not gone on.
When people ask where I picked it up, I joke about how a man I bummed a cigarette from probably licked it before passing it to me. Or it was Divine Intervention. I never say the name I’m too scared to say. I never felt a moral obligation to reach out, but I did draft a text I never sent on the doctor’s exam table. It was too angry. Logically, though, it was impossible I had given it to him because of when I became sick. By the time I found out, he would have been out of his window of infecting other people. Or he didn’t even know he was sick. Or he knew he gave it to me but didn’t fess up either.
Maybe he did something I’m too scared to say out loud and am still too scared to find out. I cried trying to imagine if he could be so cruel. Could our relationship melt down to such disrespect? Then I stopped thinking about it. There are no facts. That’s another thing about journalism—I don’t jump to conclusions without facts. Maybe he shared a bad cig or a drink or a meal with someone, or something else innocent.
There are truths I can confirm. My fall was stolen from me. It has bled into the winter, too. I am still not in control of my days and weeks, and I will never know the details that let me write the story. I am fine with it.