Living with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome :: Personal Narrative Health Essays

Living with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) The end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003 was a very trying time for my loved ones and I in Guangdong Province. I didn't know what was happening in my town. It started with people getting fevers. My father told me that the flu was spreading, that everyone is getting sick and I better stay inside if I don't want to catch it. Little did we know that what we were trying to avoid was not a mere flu outbreak, rather the coming of something much worse. My father's early dismissal of this disease only kept us comfortable a few months. By February of 2003, over 300 cases of this disease were reported just in our province. The fevers turned into respiratory problems and finally pneumonia. The Chinese Ministry of Health said this was atypical pneumonia. As conditions worsened here, it came to be known that a local doctor treating the pneumonia visited Hong Kong. Some how his contact with our infected citizens led him to infect 12 others on his hotel floor in Hong Kong. After the outbreak in Hong Kong, people started to take the disease more seriously. An outbreak occurs in Vietnam, tracing back to a man admitted in a Hanoi hospital for a high fever and sore throat. He goes on to infect 20 staff members at that hospital. At every hospital where these symptoms were present, the staff kept getting sick. The disease was termed Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS for short. By March, there was even a case of a flight attendant from Singapore who contracted the disease from a stay at a Hong Kong hotel. It was later found that through contact she had spread her case to 100 others in Singapore. During this ordeal life in our province became extremely difficult. I was told to always stay indoors. I couldn't leave the house to see my friends or even go to the store. The farmer we got our eggs from became very sick, and soon after his whole family shared his illness. People were afraid to go anywhere. We didn't know how this was getting around, all we had were the hundreds of people getting sick. The disease grew to huge proportions in Hong Kong.