Skip to main content

In the Grip Again


I’ve had dengue. Once more, it has graced me with its unwelcome presence — the second such visitation, and one I could well have done without. The fever was mercifully mild, hardly worth noting. But the itching — dear God, the itching — it was as though my entire being were begging to be scratched. Hands, feet, even the genitals clamoured in unison, each demanding attention with a kind of maddening urgency.

Unlike the first bout, there was no dramatic onset to herald the illness. No high temperatures, no conspicuous pain. It was the pruritus alone — insistent and unrelenting — that finally betrayed the virus’s return. I worked through the week in stoic ignorance, chalking up the fatigue to the usual flurry of daily demands. I was, perhaps, a touch more irritable than usual; my thinking occasionally stumbled, like a foot catching the edge of a rug. Yet in the absence of fever and with joint pain too faint to raise suspicion, I all but overlooked the presence of the disease.

Dengue, of course, is no stranger to Brazil — a longstanding adversary, deeply embedded in the nation's epidemiological history. Public efforts to curtail it have been, by and large, tepid and inconsistent, achieving limited and transient victories. There is, fortunately, a vaccine — though in the chaos of modern life, it lingers at the periphery of memory, little more than a well-meant intention, shelved and half-forgotten.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Fallacy of Self‑Sufficiency

Some people will tell you — quite loudly, usually — that they are enough. They need no one, thank you very much. Entirely self‑made. A closed circuit. I, too, fancied myself an island at one time. A small, sturdy principality of one. I paid my own bills. Made my own tea. I even spoke aloud to myself in the supermarket queue, which was meant to prove something. But late at night, when all the heroic independence had been done for the day, there it was — a sort of homesickness without a forwarding address. You know the feeling. You’re supposedly sovereign, but you still wish someone would knock. Self‑sufficiency is a word that weighs a bit too much. It sounds like an insurance policy or a piece of camping equipment. It promises freedom, but only the kind you can fit in a box. Like eating an entire birthday cake alone — which, I confess, I’ve done. Because the truth (and it arrives, as truths tend to, when you’ve just burned your toast) is that we are made of others. We are es...

A Pause Between Heartbeats

Time doesn’t tick. It breathes — unevenly, almost nervously. Sometimes it opens itself like a window you didn’t know was there. And inside that window, someone waits. Not with urgency, not with despair. Just a subtle weight: Will you come? Will you listen? You don’t need to prepare. You don’t need a speech. You only need to stop — to let the world stumble for a moment while you say, Yes, I’m here. That small pause, almost nothing, can be everything. Not everything in the dramatic sense. Everything in the sense of air when it was almost not enough. It’s not about how many minutes. Time has never obeyed clocks. What matters is the shift — leaving the room, the page, the self — to enter someone else’s trembling. Someone asks, not out loud but between words: Can you see me? And if you do — even for a beat — something sacred happens. Not salvation, no. Just a flicker of light that says, You are not alone. And that flicker, believe me, can change a day, a night, sometimes a life....

Research shows that parental warmth shapes our worldview — how might acupuncture offer a reparative experience in adulthood?

  It is becoming increasingly clear that our worldview — whether we perceive life as welcoming or hostile — is shaped far more by the emotional bonds of early childhood than by material hardship or environmental risk. A recent study, published in Child Development , revealed that an adult’s sense of safety, beauty, and benevolence in the world is deeply rooted in the warmth received from parental figures — more so than in their exposure to poverty or danger. This finding resonated with me on a personal level. Time and again, I encounter patients in clinical practice who, despite being outwardly successful and high-functioning, carry an abiding sense that the world is cold, fragmented, even threatening. In acupuncture sessions, it is not uncommon to witness how such emotional imprints — stored not only in the mind, but also in the body — manifest as chronic anxiety, diffuse pain, insomnia, or emotional detachment. Through the lens of Chinese medicine, these states reflect imbalances...