Suspected Ross River virus infection

Update Octo­ber 14

I took over three months but I have fully recovered. I never pos­ted the story here, because what I had was offic­ally not Ross River Virus and I recovered rel­at­ively quickly.

I have been embar­rassed by all the atten­tion this post has been get­ting, so I have dis­abled com­ments. I would really like to be able to refer people to a suit­able resource, so if you know of one please let me know nick001@nickcowie.com. Fail­ing that, if you want to set one I will assit if you need help set­ting up a web­site, blog or dis­cus­sion forum.

Looks like my week­end in Dwellin­gup was not with out a price. Either that week­end or in the fol­low­ing week or so I got bit­ten by a mos­qui­toe and infec­ted with the Ross River virus.

For the past two or three weeks, every time I went for a ride, the stiff­ness in my knees was far worse that ever before and for the first time I was get­ting stiff­ness in my ankles and wrists. And the recov­ery time for what were short rides was longer than epics. So much so, that very short and slow paced 11km Sat­urday morn­ing road ride, I was still suf­fer­ing Tues­day morn­ing. With the stiff­ness prob­ably worse Tues­day morn­ing than Sat­urday after­noon and feel­ing really tired. I made an appoint­ment to see my cyc­ling doc­tor, walked in, explained my symp­toms and he said with out bat­ting an eye­lid, he said Ross River Virus, we will do a test to con­firm, but I have seen enough people recently with it to know that you have it. The good news is you will get bet­ter, every­body does the bad news is there is no drug treat­ment and recov­ery times vary.

The treat­ment is rest, so no exer­cise (includ­ing cyc­ling the doc­tor was very spe­cific) and I am off work at least until the end of the week, if not longer. just typ­ing this blog post I can see why, my wrists and knuckles are being to ache. So it looks like read­ing and research time.

Moral of the story: wear insect repel­lant when out and about at dusk and dawn in Australia.

Update March 7

I failed the tests for Ross River Virus & Barmah Forest vir­uses, so my ill­ness is now classed as a mys­tery viral infec­tion. Still after two weeks of sleep­ing 15 hours a day and not being able to walk 200m, I have star­ted improv­ing. It is a slow pro­cess, I did man­age a short (15km) ride yes­ter­day and while my knees and ankle joints ached and there was stiff­ness in my ham­strings, it was no where near the level of pain I suffered on my pre­vi­ous ride.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Personal . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.