Hello, SARS

Seven years ago today, I woke up in our hotel room in Guangzhou with the sore throat from Hell.  We had arrived from Nanchang the night before, on our second to last stop on our trip to adopt Rachel.

I didn’t know why my throat hurt so bad, but I figured this was just one of my seasonal allergy sore throats that I get from time to time.  Since we left the spring-like conditions in Nanchang and jumped straight into hot and humid summer in Guangzhou, allergies seemed to be a reasonable guess.

I was worn down from dealing with Rachel, and wanted nothing more than to relax in Guangzhou and see the sights.  As each day passed, the sore throat lingered.  I couldn’t kill it.  We were in Hong Kong a few days later, where I had a brief rally just in time to get on an airplane for home.

At home, I got worse, it moved to my chest, and all hell broke loose in my body.  I went to a doctor who said “it’s just a virus” and sent me to attempt to recover on my own.  Then the SARS outbreak hit Canada, people were dying in China, and I started to wonder if I had SARS.  I certainly had had all the symptoms. 

To make a long story short, I became a SARS suspect, along with several other traveling families had hung around with in Nanchang and Guangzhou.  One bunch of friends made it to the nightly news.

At this point, I was too far into recovery to test conclusively for anything.  But I was still treated like Typhoid Mary by the medical community.

So the point of this post?  Just to celebrate the 7^th anniversary of the day I started down the path to be a STARS All Star.  I still have the newspaper clippings, somewhere.  And my lungs have never been the same.  ;^)