Peter Kelly was barely recovering from a COVID-19 infection when monkey pox struck him giving him “the worst pain” of his life.
Posted at 8:50 a.m.
The 28-year-old Torontonian had just returned to work as a dancer and fitness trainer in late May when he came down with a fever.
“I was delirious,” he said in an interview as he described the excruciating symptoms associated with the disease. He also had to battle isolation as he found himself alone during his three-week quarantine at home.
“I must have been terribly ill and I didn’t even know it. For two days, I hardly moved. I went to the bathroom, then I went back to sleep. I had a very high fever and chills at night. I wore a winter coat to bed, I was so cold,” he said.
Her fever subsided on the third day, and shortly afterwards Peter Kelly began to notice redness on her skin. Like everyone else, he took to the web to try to identify what it could mean.
“It’s the worst thing to do!” “, he admits. The man went to doctors who initially suspected a case of herpes. This first hypothesis frightened him since this infection is incurable.
As he continued his own digs, images of monkeypox captured his attention. So he went to a hospital to demand a screening test and the result came back positive.
According to him, Mr. Kelly would have been one of the first patients infected with the virus in Ontario. He is now part of a research project conducted on former patients by St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.
According to data from the Public Health Agency of Canada, there have been more than 600 cases of monkeypox in the country since June. Quebec has the most infections with 300, followed by Ontario with 230 cases, then British Columbia with 40 cases. Alberta has a dozen.
Worldwide, more than 6,000 laboratory-confirmed cases have been identified so far. Three infected people died.
Peter Kelly describes the redness and lesions caused by the infection as the most painful thing he has had to endure. The simple act of turning over in bed caused him “excruciating” pain.
He explains that it was when the redness turned into boils that the pain became unbearable.
“That’s where the pain was most powerful and I really mean powerful. I felt like electric shocks. I didn’t sleep for about thirty hours, it was just too much pain. I had a towel between my teeth to bite into and rock myself to forget the pain. But there was nothing to do. It was insane, ”said the young man.
A lesion under his left foot turned into a bloody wound as he had to put on weight to walk.
Then, to add to the unbearable pain, the isolation caused him enormous psychological stress, he said.
With the exception of a few hospital or clinic visits, Mr. Kelly was left alone for three weeks in his tiny Toronto apartment.
As the infection mainly affects men who have homosexual relations, the disease comes with its share of hateful comments.
Despite his fears of negative reactions, he decided to be open and talk about the consequences of the infection.
“I’m going to talk about it because there are other people who are going through the same thing. It’s not just me. They are in the same situation, isolated, and nobody talks about it. There are no resources,” he laments.