On Having Monkeypox

And maybe getting it at a sex club

I was at sex club in Berlin. The red light on steel and brick, the moans, the pulsating drive, the naked bodies. The way men looked at me lingering, turning, waiting to see if I would respond. The way some said no, and others, with a soft touch, drew my hand to a cock half hard, anticipating.

Yes, I had been warned: Monkeypox. There was a notice on the website. I knew about it. But I went anyway. I was making an informed decision about the level of risk I was willing to take. I was in Berlin, after all, and this was part of what I was there to do.

Around midnight I found myself chatting up a few guys after we had just licked and fucked each other in various permutations, and one said that he had already been vaccinated. “In Toronto they came to the sauna and just gave us the vaccine right there.” I’m sure I nodded in approval as I thought about the long lines and the text messages that I would get from the city of New York: “vaccines will become available at 1pm on Tuesday. Log on then to make an appointment”. And the website would crash. And the appointments would be gone in seconds.

Days pass.

I start to feel a tickle in my throat just as I return home. I feel a lump developing in my throat and I have sinus pressure (day 1). I sweat through one night, and it gets worse the next day (day 2). I wait and take some sinus medication and suck lozenges to numb my throat. The lump grows and the next day (day 3) I can’t open my mouth fully. I wasn’t going to do anything about it, but then my partner, wisely, encouraged me to go to an urgent care clinic. “If it’s strep it won’t go away,” he said, “just go and at least you’ll know”. I am not always prone to heeding his advice, but I’m glad I did. I make it to the urgent care. The PA tests me for strep. Positive.

Now, I have a history with strep throat. When I first moved to New York I caught it a few times, including once very badly and I had to have an abscess drained. That time I had also gone to an urgent care, and the doctor performed the procedure there, slicing open a piece of my throat and releasing puss and blood. It was disgusting.

So, when I told the PA this, I think he got a bit spooked, because he told me that this time it was also an abscess and that I needed to go to an emergency room right away. That it was life threatening, and they couldn’t do anything for me there. I was a bit shocked. Did I really need to go the the emergency room? Why couldn’t they do it in the same place like the time before?

Photo by Tonik on Unsplash

In a daze, I walked back home and called my primary care physician. The office manager told me that I should try an ear, nose, and throat doctor that they work with, and that they might be able to get me in that day. Ok, so I call the number, and thankfully, they can see me right away. I shuttle myself downtown, to a nondescript office building on Broadway. The doctor is kind and listens to me, managing my mouth that doesn’t want to open, my tongue that doesn’t want to lie flat. He sees the inflammation, but says it isn’t an abscess yet, and that I should start antibiotics and a steroid and the symptoms should subside quickly. If it gets worse, we can do the procedure in a couple days. This makes sense, I think.

The prescription is filled by the time I get home, and I take the meds and the next day I am feeling much better. But then…

There is this spot on my left middle finger. I had noticed it a few days earlier, and told my partner that it must have been an insect bite. It was round and looked like an ant bite, but bigger, maybe a spider? I didn’t know. My partner also thought it looked like an insect bite.

That night (day 4) I sweat through my t-shirt, again, and though I felt better the next day, the blister had been there for too long, it seemed to me. Too long to be a regular insect bite. I took a shower.

There is another blister on my groin. Fuck. It can’t be just an insect bite if there are two of them. My stomach sank and I started googling “monkeypox symptoms”.

Most of the images were of dozens of pock marks, all over the arms and sides. How could I have monkeypox if I only had one, or now two, lesions? Though, as I looked, some of the pictures did resemble the ones I had.

I call my doctor’s office again, and they can see me that day. So I race over to Chelsea (a gay doctor’s office is very important), and a warm PA sits me down and looks at my hand and says, yes, this looks a lot like what we’ve been seeing here recently. “It’s ok. You’re going to be fine,” he says. He swabs both spots and says it will take a couple days to get the results, but that they can start me on an anti-viral immediately. They’ll send the prescription to my pharmacy. Ok, great. Well, not great. But at least I have a sense of what the fuck has been going on with me for the past week. I have both strep and monkeypox, and I likely got them while I was at the sex club, or who knows, but I have both and that explains why the strep didn’t quite feel like strep, and the bite wasn’t a bite.

But then I get a call from my pharmacy saying that they don’t have access to the prescription for Tpoxx they just received from my doctor. The conversation went like this:

—What do you mean?

—We can’t get it.

—Well who can?

—Try one of the big pharmacies, like Walgreens.

—Ok, but can you order it?

—No, we can’t get it at all.

Fine. So I call the Walgreens, and have the same conversation. Maybe try the CVS. So I call the CVS, and the man who helps me also looks up at other CVS locations, and there is nothing within 20 miles.

Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash

But then! I get a call from a number I don’t recognize and it is a woman who says she’s from Pharmx, and they got a scrip from my doctor and they’ll deliver it to me tomorrow. They are the only pharmacy in New York who has it. What?

So apparently there are no pharmacies in the city who carry the experimental antiviral drug for monkeypox, which is actually a drug for smallpox.

SMALLPOX. Now, for those of you following along I am Native fucking American, and the idea that I have a strain of smallpox hits me hard. Like real hard. And then the idea that I get to take an anti-viral treatment that my ancestors never could have, makes me feel grateful and then maybe a bit…I honestly don’t know…powerless?

I would relate this story to my friend SJ on the phone and he reminded me of the legacy of smallpox blankets and the devastation of all of our peoples because of this disease. And I think about how very fortunate I am, not least because of the medicine, but also my partner’s support and that of friends and the good doctors.

And here we are: I’m isolating from my partner, though of course he has already been very much exposed, documenting this experience as if it is going to mean something. As if this is going to help me understand what has happened. And maybe it has, but I am also left with a sense that even with all the dis- and mis-information about monkeypox, I managed to get care when others could not.

Today, I’ll take my antibiotic (clindamycin), steroid (methylPREDNISolone), anti-retroviral (Truvada), SSRI (escitalopram), and then a round of anti-virals (Tpoxx), and hopefully I’ll be on the mend from my various ailments.

Two final thoughts: 1. It is wild to me that you can only get the medicine for monkeypox from one pharmacy in all of New York City. 2. I can’t fathom what it woul

d be like to have these marks appear and not know why or where they came from, and what their effects would bring. I simply can’t fathom it.