My two weeks of monkeypox hell, and how I caught it. By Sebastian Köhn, as told to Wilfred Chan, in the Guardian.
I got monkeypox and it’s been a total nightmare.
When New York Pride festivities kicked off on 24 June, I was aware that monkeypox was an emerging issue — especially for gay men — but I was also under the impression that the number of cases in the city was relatively small. …
I had sex with several guys over the weekend. Then a week later, on 1 July, I started feeling very fatigued. I had a high fever with chills and muscle aches, and my lymph nodes were so swollen they were protruding two inches out of my throat. …
I’m a 39-year-old man from Sweden, living in Brooklyn and working in philanthropy. For the past decade, my work has primarily focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights …
Two days after my symptoms began, the rash started as anorectal lesions — painful sores on my anus and rectum. …
After I went home, the rash started spreading, and I began to feel anxious. I developed lesions literally everywhere; they started out looking like mosquito bites before developing into pimply blisters that would eventually pop, then finally scab before leaving a scar. I had them on my skull, on my face, my arms, my legs, my feet, my hands, my torso, my back, and five just on my right elbow. At the peak, I had over 50 lesions, a fever of 103F and intense pain, prompting a panic attack. Ironically, the only place I didn’t have lesions was my penis.
The next day I got my STI results: positive for gonorrhoea. But no word yet on monkeypox. That’s when I developed hives everywhere on my body from my neck down, as well as a headache, arthritis pain in my fingers and shoulders and a strange pain in my shin bone that got so painful that I couldn’t stand up. At night, I would wake up going crazy with both pain and itching from the lesions and hives, just sitting up in bed and scratching myself. I was isolated, lonely and frustrated with how unfair the situation was. I was clearly very sick, yet had to cobble together a care plan on my own.
My anorectal lesions, which were already very painful, turned into open wounds. It felt like I had three fissures right next to each other, and it was absolutely excruciating. I would literally scream out loud when I went to the bathroom. Even keeping the area clean, like washing myself, was extremely painful. It was a two hour process each time.
Then my throat started swelling up. My tonsils were covered in white pus. …
Rod Dreher, who adds what the Guardian left out:
Sebastian Köhn is interviewed in this clip from the Open Society Foundation, the George Soros philanthropy where he is an executive. It’s promoting a Soros project to celebrate and legitimize prostitution. This is what Mr. Monkeypox does for a living: advocates whoring. This is what George Soros wants the rest of us to believe in. …
Ah, so Sebastian understood that monkeypox was a problem, but he couldn’t help himself on Pride weekend, because, I guess, what better way to celebrate being gay than screwing several guys over the course of a weekend?…
How was he supposed to know it was a bad idea to have anonymous sex while a nasty STD is going around the gay male community? Stupid city health authorities. And he tried to get vaccinated the day before, without luck. What kind of homophobic monster would expect Sebastian to keep his pants up for his own health on Pride Weekend, of all weekends? …
Sebastian goes on to blame the public health authorities, saying this outbreak “should not have been allowed to happen.” At no point does he take responsibility for his own gross and irresponsible behavior. (Who is Sebastian Köhn? He works for George Soros. …)
What the Pride campaign never tells you:
I encourage you to read Joseph Sciambra’s writing. It is searing and it is vulnerable. … What I’ve found so moving about Sciambra’s writing is not his descriptions of what vile people do with their bodies, but the utter spiritual desolation of the whole thing. He’s not writing about lesbian communities, but rather gay male ones. The world Sciambra reveals — a world he was part of for some time — is a world of men without women, a loveless abyss through which rutting males move like the undead. …
In this essay, Sciambra, who is now in his early 50s, begins by talking about how he’s facing yet another surgery to repair his anus, which was so damaged from years of anal sex that he has trouble with continence. (On that topic, a friend recently told me that her mother, now a retired physician, told her once in passing that if you’ve had to deal with gay male patients condemned in early middle age to wearing diapers because of this, you cannot be sentimental about Pride and the rest.)
Gay people are so now feted by society, so trendy. Is there anything we could do to make them out as even more wonderful? What if we made a special flag for them, and waved it on all occasions instead of our national flags? Oh wait, we already do that.
This has gone too far — especially because of the grooming effect of all this over-the-top positivity about being gay.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
