It is a bright Saturday morning. The rays of the sun shine brightly into your one room apartment, right into your face and interrupting your sleep. You roll over grumpily on your bed. You have told your roommate, Funto, repeatedly not to leave the windows open. You had a rough night yesterday. It was one of your coworkers' birthdays. As you stretch and quake on your bed, while pondering what to eat for breakfast and what to take for your headache, you notice the aching sensation spreading all over your body, seeping through your veins.
Ah shit, it is malaria, you think to yourself. As you make to stand up, you miscalculate your first step and fall back to the bed. That is when you slowly begin to suspect that this might not be all it seems. It is probably all that stress from yesterday, you say to yourself. But soon, you begin to feel the room spinning around you, the lights are going out in your head and your vision is getting blurry. You stumble into the bathroom, ignoring the cheery greetings of your obnoxious neighbours and their dumb kids, to throw some water on your face.
On getting back to your room, you feel even weaker. It becomes even more clear to you that this is not an ordinary illness. You begin to calculate the possibilities and then try to deduce the root causes. It definitely can't be pregnancy, you think to yourself. Yourself and your not-so-serious-situationship and sex partner parted ways exactly two months ago. Since immaculate conception is not a scientifically proven fact, you bask in the relief that you're not in the throes of bringing another life into earth. Not in this Tinubu economy.
Next, you begin to analyse what you ate and drank at the party yesterday. You had only one plate of jollof rice like the lowkey girl that you are. And you downed it with two bottles of heineken, so that can't be the cause of your strange after party sickness. Your mind shifts to your activities throughout the course of the previous day as well as the past week. You did not experience any strange sickness during the week that was now rounding up. Just then, it crosses your mind that you danced with one of the notoriously promiscuous female coworkers at the party. You guys were so engrossed in trying to best each other on the dance floor that at one point, everyone else cleared and let you guys go all out.
Your health instincts kick into overdrive and you begin to worry about those things you've heard about contracting STDs, most especially about body fluids. You had heard from the office gossip that she was a walking vault of various sexually transmitted disease and health complications. Suddenly a cold shiver comes over you. You curse angrily under your breath as you reach for your phone. The restlessness and curiosity was eating you up. You quickly scroll past your astrology app and your daily affirmation app. You ignore the barrage of social messages and notifications that come in as soon as you turn on your data. You instead open the google chrome app. Your first search is: “Can someone die by dancing with a person who is infected with chlamydia?”
Over the next few minutes, it is as though you've never attended any sexual education seminar, or that you weren't even taught anything remotely related to health education when you were in school. You search for “signs of various STDs”, “new STDs”, “how to avoid dying from STDs”, “drugs one can take to cure gonorrhea”, “Can an std kill you in 24 hours?” With every new answer you get you start checking your body for new symptoms. You even start writing the symptoms down so you can effectively surmise which disease is ravaging your body.
The more you search, the more desperate you become. One of the websites says that a symptom of STD is weight loss, you check your body and realise that you've lost weight. Another says it is paleness, you check your mirror and observe how pale your face has become. Another mentions itchiness and rash and you start experiencing that too—all that itchiness in the past week was neither due to an allergic reaction or a bed bug. You were dying. You start worrying about the social stigma you're going to get from dying from a combination of STDs. You, the child of a religious cleric.
Just when you start thinking of how to prepare your will, you see a new website that describes your last three symptoms. It even predicts that at the time you are experiencing those symptoms, a new mole will appear on your cheeks. According to the researchers and doctors of the website, it is a new disease found in the rural and uninhabited areas of Kukukunki kingdom in Africa and apparently no one has survived it yet. It is at this point you realise that you are in soup.
You are in fact dying.
And it is in fact a new disease.
It is called New Ode* syndrome.
NEW WORD
*Ode – Fool
