Two weeks with dengue fever: No bone breaking, but no fun, either.

It started with a fever and ended with a week in Bangkok. Well, more precisely, it started with a mosquito bite, and hasn’t ended yet.

It is… dengue fever. The dreaded mosquito-borne tropical disease lovingly referred to as breakbone fever. Breakbone cause supposedly that’s what it feels like.

Fortunately, dengue didn’t make my bones feel like they were breaking. After the initial fever it just made me feel really tired.

The fever lasted only two or three days, but my other symptoms were severe enough to send me to Bangkok, where there’s safe blood.

My severe symptoms: plummeting platelets and white blood cells. According to Wikipedia, platelets are the stuff swimming around in your blood that help form blood clots, or help stop bleeding. White blood cells help defend your body from infectious diseases. As my case of dengue demonstrated, these pale cells aren’t always successful.

But after nearly two weeks of laying in bed and guzzling water, my white blood cells are beginning to get their acts together. I’m now back in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and the only lingering trace of dengue my body has is a giant liver.

I am back at the hotel in Phnom Penh where the staff members now know me as the Khmer translation of “the girl who fainted.”

And she’s down

The fainting was before Bangkok. I had spent seven hours in a taxi from my site without much food on the way.

Shortly after my arrival in Phnom Penh, I was in bed trying to sleep when the Peace Corps doctor called me. It was nearly 9 p.m. She asked if I had eaten dinner. When I said no, she demanded that I eat — without leaving the hotel. She told me to ask the hotel staff for help.

I followed the doctor's advice, but the workers at the desk downstairs said they were “too busy” to help. Too busy booking hour-long bed sessions for the gaggle of girls streaming through the doors. These girls, clad in tiny tops and butt-length skirts, were tripping in, trailed by plain-yogurt-looking men.

The hotel staff told me to get my own food, so after some research, I called a noodle spot down the street and asked for delivery. I was getting my money ready and leaning against the front desk for support when I went down. My last thought was how nice it would be to lay down on the floor.

My body obeyed my brain’s desire. I came to just like in a movie, awakening to a chorus of muted voices in a blurry sea of color.

Then the sea focused. I was sitting in a chair. A Khmer man was massaging my back, and a New Zealand woman was pouring bottled water down my throat. A crowd was gathered, and the delivery man from the restaurant was standing off to the side, holding my food.

After thanking the masseuse and water supplier, I paid for my food and went up to my room to eat. One of the hotel staffers carried my food to my room. Lesson learned: sometimes if you want help, you’ve got to faint for it.

Hospitals and inns in Bangkok

Before Bangkok, I had heard raves from other Peace Corps volunteers about the city’s luxurious hospital treatment.

Luxurious? Maybe, but still a hospital. It still smelled like chemicals, and my sleep was still interrupted every four hours by nurses strapping a blood-pressure cuff on my arm and shoving a thermometer in my mouth.

I selected my meals from a menu, but it was still bland hospital food, and for the first few days until I got a hold of that menu, every meal was fish. Even my scrambled eggs were served with a side of fried fish.

The hospital shower was also cold. Maybe a shower with water at a comfortable temperature is a safety hazard?

But the hospital did have good TV. That’s something that was lacking at the Bangkok hotel where I stayed for about half the week.

The hotel had a shower with hot water, at least, and even a half-kitchen in my suite. But no good TV. The hotel was tiny and old, and really not even a hotel, but an inn. The only English channels were CNN and HBO Max — easily the worst HBO channel. During my stay, HBO Max played only 1960s movies that looked like they were from the 1920s. Movies like “Spartacus” and “Jason and the Argonauts” and some other famous black-and-white movie about the life of Jesus. So famous I can’t remember the name.

Thankfully I had some post-1960s entertainment with me — in the form of more than 50 episodes of “Whose Line is it Anyway?” The British version of the improv TV show. But the DVDs I had weren't much more current than the 1960s. They were of the show’s first two seasons, which taped in 1988 and 1989. The outdated topics and funny accents made the show difficult to understand at times, but made me laugh more than “Jason and the Argonauts” would have.

Like at the hospital, food in the hotel became repetitive. Maybe because the hotel was across the street from the hospital and I ate every meal there. I didn’t have to eat in a patient room, but had the pick of three chain restaurants: McDonald's, Starbucks or the pseudo French Au Bon Pain. I picked the latter for most every meal, until I got brave and picked a couple pretty pictures off the menu at one of the Thai places.

I knew I was getting better when I went in for my blood test on my last day in Bangkok. For the first time that week, I didn’t have to ask the nurses for a blanket and a bed to lay on while I shivered and waited to be called for the test. I was still wearing four shirts on that last day though.

Back to the scene of the crime

It’s now the eve of my return to my site — the site where I live and also the site where a vicious mosquito tried to kill me with poisonous blood. I’m terrified, and am constantly brushing away imaginary mosquitoes. But all I can do is follow the doctor’s advice: wear mosquito repellent on my skin and clothes and pray I don’t get dengue again. I hear it’s worse the second time.