MPX update

A wound is healing

Welllllllll here we are three almost four weeks after the MPX diagnosis. I feel fine overall, but I have this lingering wound that is taking forever to heal. It was a lesion that got infected, and I have been watching my body heal itself, slowly but surely.

Before I get to that, I want to clarify a couple things about having MPX in case it is useful.

First, the Tpoxx antiviral treatment worked very well for me. It should be made available to everyone who has MPX. It is used for this purpose in Europe. The US is calling Tpoxx experimental, which, whatever, but we need a drastic increase in access to this treatment.

On Sunday James wrote some emails to our public officials, and I did the same. My asks were:

1. Increase testing beyond men who have sex with men, but also make it much more widely available for MSM.

2. Increase access to Tpoxx because it alleviates many of the symptoms that people are having, even the ones that have to do with bowel movements and proctitis. And it also helps clear the lesions so people don’t have to isolate for so long. (For example, we need people to be able to get a prescription quickly and easily. Lots of people I know haven’t even been able to see their PCP because of backlogs, and so are spending weeks with really terrible symptoms.)

3. Increase access to the MPX vaccine. This is obvious, and it is insane that we have yet to implement a full scale vaccine distribution plan.

Second, I was interviewed by PBS News Hour for a segment on Monkeypox and the difficulty of accessing treatment. I think things are getting better now, but there is still a long way to go. I found it difficult to be interviewed about my body, about what was happening specifically to me as a patient, rather than a commenter or “expert”. And it reminds me that I’m not an expert at anything, and most of what I have to say is actually just my own experience, channeled through my body.

I was also interviewed by a Spanish newspaper, El Español, about my experience and to comment on the stigma surrounding MPX. While I don’t agree with some of the framing of the article—especially re the opening anecdote about Africa—I was glad to be able to shed some light on how the misinformation about who can be infected with MPX (it isn’t just gays), is a reflection of blatant and insistent homophobia, a discourse that not only connects gays to disease, but which imagines gays as disease.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that I was the only person interviewed who agreed to use his real name and show his face. Perhaps I shouldn’t have looked at the comments. Don’t look at the comments, kin. Just don’t ever do it. And holy shit. The Spanish public, at least the trolls who came out to troll this article were talking about divine punishment and the will of god and all kinds of punitive messianism. It was predictable, but still.

Now I have Drake’s “God’s Plan” stuck in my head.

The real thing I wanted to write about was a moment when I looked at this wound and it stared back at me. I couldn’t help think that this infection was trying to teach me something. The wound, this vesicle, is a container for a virus that has already made its way into my blood. This wound is container for life. Is it not also like any other nursery—cultivating, growing? Growing and growing, the infection spreads, down my finger, swelling. And I can feel the blood churning.

I’m left with a scab—such a terrible word, and yet scab is the body stitching itself back together. A scab becomes a scar becomes a reminder of the body becoming whole.

If a lesion is what we call this, then damage is only part of the story.

The wound darkens:

rhodolite, cochineal, garnet,

blood, crystallizing

a shield,

an eye.