In my best Sophia Petrillo impression:
Picture it: Harlem, 2007.
Gentrification creeped its way into the historically Black neighborhood, but a decade would pass before a Whole Foods popped up on W. 125th Street. George W. Bush was in his second presidential term, and absolutely no one thought a Black politician named Barack Obama would become his successor. Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” blasted from speakers, long before the rapper would wear Make America Great Again hats and praise Adolf Hitler. Apple released its first iPhone that summer, forever changing mobile technology. Beyonce topped that year’s Billboard 100 with her hit “Irreplaceable.” The U.S. stock market fell, prompted by the subprime mortgage crisis—few Americans realizing the economic turmoil that lie ahead.
That June, a young Black woman moved from Atlanta to New York for a coveted internship at Essence magazine to pursue her journalism dreams. She lived her best twenty-one-year-old life that summer. Along the way, she encountered a virulent entity that would change the course of her life forever. That young woman was me. And the infectious disease was the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), also known as mononucleosis or mono.
According to the National Institutes of Health, approximately 95 percent of the world’s populace has EBV, which lives in the body forever. Most people who contract the virus become sick from four to six weeks, experiencing symptoms that range from fatigue to sore throat, muscle aches, headaches, and swollen lymph nodes. For the majority of those who come into contact with EBV, they get sick at the onset and then move on. In others, the virus wreaks havoc on their immune systems and heightens their risk of developing autoimmune disorders and other chronic illnesses.
I’m one of the unlucky ones.
Because mono primarily spreads through saliva, it is commonly known as the “kissing disease” and mentioned in hushed tones or through giggles. I wish I contracted mono from kissing. If only my story was that exciting. But alas, my journey with the virus began with vomit instead of a passionate lip lock.
In June of 2007, I arrived in New York bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, excited but a little nervous about living in the big city alone. I moved into The Towers, a dormitory on the campus of The City College of New York in Harlem. The college opened the doors of its dormitory to nonstudents interning in the city during the summer. One of my suitemates was a young Peruvian American woman interning at a law firm, who had the bigger side of the apartment and her own private bathroom. I paid less to live on the other side in a teeny bedroom with a twin-sized cot and a shared bathroom. The other suitemate was a white girl from New Jersey who spent a lot of time back home, rarely setting foot in our apartment that summer. I don’t remember much about her, other than she loved the nightlife and gave off strong I experiment with drugs vibes, so let’s just call her New Jersey Party Girl.
I loved that New Jersey Party Girl spent so much of her time in Jersey because I had the entire side of our suite and our shared bathroom to myself most of the time. The law student and I were busy with our internships, but became friends and spent our evenings unwinding and watching TV together. She left for her internship much earlier than me in the mornings. I relished my morning solitude and spent that time in our living room watching BET or MTV, waiting for one of my two favorite music videos of the summer to come on the screen: Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Eve’s “Tambourine.” After watching my favorite videos and doing half-baked dance routines, I would rush out of the apartment to make it to the train station on West 125th Street to get to the Essence office inside the Time Warner building, a few blocks from Times Square, by 10 a.m. (I was often late.)
Later that summer, New Jersey Party Girl returned to the apartment one night and left me with an unwanted present.
I stumbled into our bathroom in the morning to find vomit splattered all over the bathroom, from the toilet to the floor tiles to the inside of the tub. Ewwwwww…I’ve been a germaphobe for as long as I can remember. Cleaning up someone else’s vomit was a level ten on the list of activities I did not want to do. But that was the only bathroom I had, so I scrunched up my face in disgust, rolled up my sleeves, and went to cleaning up the vomit-splattered bathroom.
New Jersey Party Girl moved all of her stuff out of the dorm suite shortly after that, but I wasn’t home when she left, and I never got to discuss the bathroom situation with her. As my internship at Essence wrapped up in early August, that vomit-filled morning became nothing more than a blip in my time in the city. At the end of the internship, the Essence editors gave all the interns a big goodbye party in the office. I had grown so much professionally and as a person by the time I left New York.
I returned home to Atlanta on a high, unknowingly bringing back something else in addition to my luggage: the Epstein-Barr virus.
I should stop the story at this point to say I’m only 92.4 percent sure I contracted mono from my roommate’s vomit. Who knows? Perhaps I had blocked the path of a subway rat on its way to work one morning and, pissed at the temporary delay I caused because it had places to be, the rat spit on me in frustration. It’s also possible that I came into close contact with someone on the plane leaving New York.
But the bathroom vomit seems like the most plausible way I got mono, so I’m sticking with that.
After a brief stay at home, I made my way back to Tallahassee, for my last year as an undergraduate journalism student at Florida A&M University. Once I started the semester, I found myself overcome with fatigue and fell into a funk. I needed a minimum of twelve hours of sleep a night to function and, even then, I still felt extremely tired each day. Twenty-one-year-old me rationalized this sudden onset as short-term sadness. I’d come back from the high of a New York City summer to the sleepy college town of Tallahassee; of course I needed a little time to come down from that. This was just a little depressive episode—it would pass. Now that I’ve been living in this body for almost four decades, the thought of fatigue that caused me to sleep for twelve to fourteen hours not prompting me to go to a doctor, is improbable and wildly irresponsible behavior. Now, as soon as a symptom presents itself, I’m scheduling an appointment to figure out what the hell is going on. But college me wasn’t chronically ill yet and had not entered the campus clinic since freshman year. I passed by the campus counseling center regularly, but never stepped foot inside.
I didn’t go to my friends, family, or professors for assistance. I pushed through and kept it moving. To this day, I’m able to remain high functioning and hate burdening anyone with my health issues. This is something I’m proud of, but recognize is a sign of hyper independence and also kind of a problem.
Anyhoo, back to 2007.
Fortunately, my fall internship at The Tallahassee Democrat didn’t begin right away. By the time the internship started, my mono symptoms eased a bit and, while I was still tired, I didn’t need as much sleep. In the spring semester, I could barely drag myself out of bed in the mornings, but attributed the fatigue to the stress of a high course load. It wasn’t until two years later, at twenty-three, living back home in Atlanta, that I thought: I’m pretty tired all the time. That’s probably not normal for someone in their early twenties. Maybe I should go see a doctor.
I made an appointment with a functional medicine doctor who, after bloodwork, informed me I had contracted mono at some point in the previous two years, and it was still present in my system. It was, she said, a common virus that most people contracted at some point in their lives. As she ran through the symptoms, my mind immediately went back to that mysterious bout of depression. That was mono?! Who knew? The doctor was pretty nonchalant about the whole thing and gave me a vague chronic fatigue diagnosis and herbs to help with energy and mood. I took the herbs for a while, but they didn’t have much effect. After a few months I stopped taking them.
I spent the rest of my twenties trying to address my fatigue through various methods, from exercise and diets to alternative health treatments such as acupuncture. I felt better once I switched to a clean diet and began exercising regularly, but I still didn’t have the energy of the average twenty-something.
Years later, in my early thirties, plagued with a number of mysterious maladies and chronic health issues, my Miami acupuncturist looked over my most recent lab work, reviewed her notes, squinted her eyes, and asked, “By any chance, have you ever had mono?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, I think I had it maybe eleven, twelve years ago. Why?”
Her eyes lit up. “Did you know some people never recover? This could be causing a lot of your symptoms. Epstein-Barr could be the missing piece!”
She was way too excited about this mono news. But I’d been seeing her for months, and she was just happy to make some headway in figuring out my cornucopia of mysterious symptoms. She hit me with a barrage the long-term effects of the virus and told me I should take a test. I returned to her office a few weeks later with the test results, and yup, EBV antibodies were indeed swimming around inside my body.
My acupuncturist began a new protocol and encouraged me to ask my general practitioner for a vitamin D test, just in case. It turns out, even though I lived in Miami, the vitamin D level in my blood was 14 ng/ml, which is critically low. Vitamin D deficiency causes fatigue and other symptoms. My acupuncturist scared the hell out of me about my low vitamin D level, saying my bloodwork matched those of cancer patients. I recoiled. Cancer! I Oh my God! I thought we were just dealing with a little fatigue! Now this is getting serious.
During this time, I began researching the long-term effects of mono as well as vitamin D deficiency, which is common among Black Americans due to the way our skin limits natural absorption of the vitamin from the sun. Not only does the deficiency lead to a higher risk for chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes and breast cancer, EBV is associated with the increased development of autoimmune disorders and chronic conditions including lupus, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, and rheumatoid arthritis. I took my acupuncturist’s concerns seriously, followed her protocol, took vitamin D orally, focused on my diet, and continued to exercise regularly. About eleven months later, I was still struggling, but overall, I was in good shape and felt pretty good most of the time.
Then came March 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic.
All of the local acupuncture clinics closed, deemed nonessential healthcare operations. I fell off my clean diet, filling my grocery store cart with pints of brand new Ben & Jerry’s flavors (my favorites were the Cookies & Cream Cheesecake Core and the Brownie Batter Core—my mouth is watering just thinking about them). Binging on ice cream, working from home with a more sedentary lifestyle; and not having regular acupuncture sessions sent my health into a tailspin. From 2020 to 2021, a host of new chronic conditions shimmied their way into my body: ENTER PCOS! ENTER PMDD! ENTER ANXIETY! ENTER OCD!
Before the pandemic, I considered myself a pretty brave person. I only feared two things: heights and going to the ATM at night. But the 2020 ushered a terror inside of me I’d never felt before: the words “LONG COVID,” another virus that could cause lifelong problems. I already had EBV—I did not need another virus doing the running man up and down my already weakened immune system.
Fearful of getting sick, especially when I lived alone in Miami and had friends, but not people who would care for me if I got seriously ill—I went into COVID-anxiety overdrive. I rarely left the house unless absolutely necessary for grocery store and gas station runs. I masked whenever I was indoors with other people. I sanitized my groceries when I got home, and cleaned the entire apartment and myself before settling in after a trip outside. These COVID-anxiety behaviors morphed into obsessive-compulsive disorder, something I still struggle with.
Over the years, as the pandemic waned, I’ve lessened some of my anxieties about getting sick. I never caught COVID, that I know of? Nonetheless, I still mask in certain spaces such as stores, doctor’s offices, elevators, bathrooms, and at the airport. I’m less social than I used to be and still fear attending events with large amounts of people in indoor spaces. I hate that the pandemic turned me into this anxiety-ridden, frightful person who is only a few levels above full-blown agoraphobic. I miss who I was before 2020. But I’ve gradually accepted that person is gone, and she’s not coming back.
I think back to the summer of 2007 often. Contracting mono began my long journey down the road of chronic illness. I wonder if things could have turned out differently if I’d never gone to New York for that internship. What if I’d stayed in another dorm? What if I’d shared a bathroom with a different roommate instead of New Jersey Party Girl? Could I have lived a different life in my twenties if I hadn’t gotten mono? Who would I be if I never became a sick girl?
Whenever I go down this road, the “butterfly effect” always comes to mind, and I begin pondering what else would change if I altered that one aspect of my past. Or, what if I was destined to become sick that summer, even if I didn’t go to New York, and became ill some other way?
Once these questions send my head spinning, I shut down the inner monologue. I can’t go back in time and stop myself from getting sick. But if I could go back, I would march up to my twenty-one-year-old self and tell her, “Listen, girl, you’re going to get mono at the end of this summer. So you’d better get out in those New York streets and frolic. Push outside your comfort zone and try soft drugs (we’re not trying to get addicted to crack or heroin, sis), dance until you’re sweaty in clubs and kiss strangers. In the words of Joan from Girlfriends, go outside and seek your ‘enchanted love.’ Live your best life. Because after this summer, you’re never going to have this much energy again. So, enjoy it now, while you can.”
If nothing else, I wish I could tell my younger self to go wild, so current me could have a better anecdote for how I contracted mono. For me, it’s all about having a good story. And saying, “I was out in them streets wildin’ out. You know, the summer I met Ricky, who ruined my credit but was great in bed. And I don’t know if it was when I tried mushrooms for the first time or when I got drunk and kissed that subway pole because I thought it was a cute guy, but somehow I got mono in New York,” is a way better tale than the version I have in which I got sick while cleaning my roommate’s chunky vomit from the bathroom tile.
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