For a considerable part of that month I had experienced what I think may have been a semi coma if there is such a thing. In this semiconscious state I frequently found myself at one end of a long dark tunnel peering at the other end where there was a shining light. The light was a dancing sparkling entity that kept enticing me to come closer. Far from wanting to reach it I resisted its insistent pull. Eventually this reoccurring illusion dissipated and I re-entered the realms of reality. My nose stopped bleeding, I graduated from soups to solids and started exercising a bit to get my muscles back in shape. My sister rejoined me in our bedroom but not before it was completely sanitized. I hoped my worrisome eye problem would go away as I got stronger and was eating properly again.
My first day back at school and I was still seeing double. This is inconvenient when plotting shapes in geometry, and was especially stressful for an enthusiastic reader. An eye examination revealed that I had significant damage to my left eye, despite the care taken not to expose me to light during my illness. I was soon fitted with glasses – not a delightful idea for a teenager. Fortunately I could manage without them in a pinch –dating for example or performing in music festivals in which I sometimes competed. For the next two years I was on iron supplements for anemia. Many, many years later in 2019, due to advances in eye surgery, that damaged eye left eye has become my good eye, and although the right eye is no longer dominant, it has recovered significantly since being stricken with a blood clot in March, 2018.
Later in life I had brought measles home from the school in which I taught at the time. My son was soon home from kindergarten and covered with red dots. We kept the lights low. He refused to go to bed during the day, preferring to sit stoically in a comfortable chair with a couple of favorite toys, and was only away from kindergarten for a week. His little sister was not affected.
Was my Rubeola experience a close call, if so to where? I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about my illness once I had recovered. After all it was just an especially severe case of a common children’s disease. Recently, when it became clear that measles were staging a comeback, that “light at the end of the tunnel” vision resurfaced on the screen of my memory bank and took on greater significance. What if I hadn’t survived? I would have missed all the wonderful experiences that followed my recovery! If there is a moral to this story it is that this contagious disease needs to be taken seriously. No one wants to lose a loved one and no one wants to live with impaired vision. In Canada vaccination against measles has been available since 1963. In 1989 booster shots became available. Prevention is there for us.
