“It’s like the virus changed. In my house there are four of us, and none of us are worth a kilo to do anything for exactly sixty-three days now”
VILLA CLARA.- The strongest pain that Leydis Pérez had felt in her life coincided with her recovery from her second cesarean section, until she ended up becoming infected with Chikungunyajust a month and a half ago, when the virus was at its highest contagion peak in Villa Clara. Despite having taken multiple precautions, and although until then she considered herself a young, strong and healthy person in her early thirties, the virus left her practically immobile for fifteen days, using her family members to get up, walk to the bathroom and even comb her hair or brush her teeth.
“I still feel like I’m carrying a bag of stones on my shoulders,” describes this self-employed hairdresser who lives in the Santa Catalina neighborhood in Santa Clara. “That first week was so bad that I involuntarily relieved myself on the bed twice.” After having passed the stage that specialists call the “acute phase,” he still suffers from severe back pain and inflammation in his hands that barely allows him to attend to his business for half a day. “Right now I can’t even hold the hair dryer, much less the iron. I get shakes from one moment to the next and my fingers get stiff to the point that days ago I gave a client a burn,” he details.
If the acute phase of Chikungunya causes general discomfort for a few days added to sudden high fever and skin rashes, the subsequent period known as subacute or chronic occurs with severe joint pain, stiffness, inflammation and fatigue that can last for weeks, months and some specialists indicate that they can even last for years. The term itself, which derives from the Makonde language, used in Tanzania and Mozambique, literally means “he who bends” or “he who stoops”, in reference to the twisted posture that patients adopt due to the intense pain it causes.
Before Chikungunya hit the country with such force and severity, many Cubans joked on social networks about the similarity in the way the infected people walked with the scenes from Michael Jackson’s Thriller video clip. However, the situation stopped being a joke and became alarming when deaths associated with complications of a disease began to be recorded that, according to the WHOis not usually fatal in most cases.
In the same multi-family building where Leydis has her hairdressing business, there are more than seven residents convalescing from the virus that has left Cuba mired in a wave of chronic ailments and physical limitations. Many of them are elderly people who live alone, especially because their children have emigrated out of the country, and who, still twisted by pain, must fend for themselves in daily tasks such as searching for food. Recently, one of these elderly people was stranded for more than two hours on the steps of the stairs because he claimed he did not have the strength to climb back up to his apartment.
Although there are no real statistics by area on the number of families that were recently infected, or that still suffer from the effects of Chikungunya, it is enough to listen to the experiences of people on the streets or on social networks to verify the magnitude of the consequences it has left on an aging population, without access to medications to alleviate the ailments and with an extremely deficient food base. In the case of Villa Clara, one of the provinces with the highest number of sick reports in the country, the waste collection and the “fumigation campaign” in homes were undertaken too late, when the virus had already spread in almost all the municipalities.
The multiple consequences, as described by those affected themselves, range from immobilizing ailments especially in the hands, feet and ankles, sudden dizziness and rheumatological symptoms that the medical literature names as polyarthralgia, polyarthritis or tenosynovitis. Neurological, psychological, dermatological consequences and transient liver conditions have also been described in some cases. Last October the post denouncing Adriana Garciaa mother from Havana whose first symptoms began with conjunctivitis caused by swelling of almost all of the extremities and whose culmination was precisely a reactive hepatitis caused, according to what the doctors told her, “by the virus itself and the abuse of paracetamol to lower the fever and calm the pain.”
“I feel like the tendons in my hands are being pulled. I can’t close them, and when I’m going to get out of bed I get dizzy and I fall to the sides,” describes Regla Caridad, a woman over 60 years old who lives in the Condado district who, since she was infected more than a month ago, has never been able to open the coffee maker or even a water knob by herself. The doctor who treats his area suggested daily consumption of multivitamin complexes and a cycle of prednisone to control joint stiffness, a medication that is currently priced at more than 600 pesos per blister on the informal market.
Although some specialists specifically recommend treating the persistent inflammatory clinical picture with corticosteroids such as prednisone, many convalescents report that, although they feel some relief in the first days, the painful symptoms return at the end of the treatment. “It’s as if the virus changed. In my house there are four of us, and none of us are worth a kilo to do anything for exactly sixty-three days now,” says Alberto Mendoza, who before being infected worked in the manufacture of iron bars, but now feels too much tingling in his arms and cramps that sometimes do not allow him to even tie his shoelaces. “Only on paracetamol and naproxen we have spent more than five thousand pesos since we started this misfortune.”
Meanwhile, and in the midst of the uncontrollable outbreak of Chikungunya and the evident consequences in a good part of the Cuban population, the official press suggests the consumption of B complex vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids to “contribute to recovery”, which are only acquired at high resale prices. Other local media in Villa Clara currently brazenly suggest the consumption of anti-inflammatories every eight hours to relieve pain and prioritize the intake of foods such as eggs and legumes.
