A few years ago, the West Nile Virus was all the craze in the United States. Everyone got pretty freaked out about a little mosquito biting you and giving you this disease that was killing people left and right. Well, the disease hit home for me, because my cousin Eric, who lives in Ohio, got West Nile. It’s been two years, and he’s finally recovered from it. Since the disease is still around though, I thought that I would share this article that was written about him two years ago. Sorry for the length of it, but there is only a physical copy of it, so I had to retype it.

Click on that “more” thing down there to read the story.

Man Wins battle against West Nile
Dave Perozek, The Chronicle-Telegram
October 10, 2002

OBERLIN–Delirious and near death, Eric Pfeifer’s chances for survival seemed grim less than a month ago.

Normally the picture of health and vigor, he lay in a bed at Cleveland’s MetroHealth Medical Center for a week barely able to left even a spoon.

Nurses stuffed bags of ice under and around his armpits, legs and head to relieve a fever that hovered near 105 degrees for five straight days.

Doctors continually wavered on the cause of Pfeifer’s sudden illness. At first the diagnosis was viral meningtis. Then it was the more extreme bacterial meningtis. Then it was listeria.

Five days into the 29-year-old Pfeifer’s stay at MetroHealth, it finally became clear that Pfeifer had contracted West Nile virus.

Sitting his his kitchen Wednesday afternoon with his wife, Jayne, and two young children, Pfeifer, now 30 pounds lighter than a month ago, said he is still battling the virus–though the worst part is over. He improves every day, but doctors say it could be a year before he fully recovers.

Pfeifer is one of the latest victims of West Nile and the youngest of the dozen documented cases in Lorain County.

“We’d keep seeing it on the news, but I never thought in a million years it would happen to me,” Pfeifer said. “I never worried about a mosquito. I couldn’t imagine a bug could do this to someone.”

Pfeifer never saw the bug that bit him. During Labor Day weekend he started feeling tired. The following week he’d come home from work early each day feeling sick.

On the morning of Sept. 14, he woke up and could barely move. When he tried to walk, he walked sideways. He had a pain in his head he described as “the worst pain I’ve ever had.”

On the way to the hospital, he had to have a blanket wrapped around him because of how cold he felt. Pfeifer doesn’t remember much else from the next seven days he spent at MetroHealth, but for his family it was torture.

“I was worried about our kids,” said Jayne Pfeifer, Eric’s wife of seven years. The couple have two children: Nicholas, 5, and Olivia, 3.

“I kept thinking, ‘What am I going to do, what am I going to tell them?’ I was a basket case, just crying, thinking he wouldn’t make it,” she said.

Eric Pfeifer’s mother, Liz Rader of LaGrange, spent about 10 hours a day at her son’s side, praying for his recovery.

“It was a nighmare because of all the different things you’re told by the doctors,” Rader said. “It set me back to see someone so strong become so weak. West Nile is an awful diseas–I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

Jayne Pfeifer said her husband’s eyes were rolling into the back of his head. Sometimes he’d be responsive, but as the fever rose he would become delirious.

“You’d ask him where he was, and he’d say, ‘Sea World.’ The things coming out of his mouth were unreal,” she said.

Initial test results of Eric Pfeifer’s spinal fluid indentified his affliction as polio. That was an error, however, and a later test confirmed a doctor’s suspicion that it was West Nile.

Docotrs can do very little for West Nile victims.

“There’s nothing you can do. That’s what’s scary,” Jayne Pfeifer said. “Your body has to fight it. You have to hope your body is strong.”

When he was finally released from MetroHealth, Pfeifer didn’t even have the strength to sign his own discharge forms.

Pfeifer’s comeback has been slow but steady. He has horrible headaches when he’s awake and bad nightmares when he sleeps. He eats “like a horse” to regain the pounds he lost. The biggest problem he feels is not physical, but mental.

“Psychologically it’s been hard because I feel like total crap,” he said. “I have no stamina, no strength.”

Eric Pfeifer is used to working all day at his family’s excavating business, then coming home and playing with his kids. If he’s lucky, he will have enough strength to go back to work within a month.

“I hope so,” he said. “I can only watch so many movies.”

In February 2001, he suffered a work-related accident that caused him to get his nose rebuilt, and he had hundreds of stitches in his face. He thought that would be the worst pain he’d ever feel.

“But that was cake compared to this,” Pfeifer said.

Now, when anyone in the Pfeifer family goes outside, they all wear bug spray. Lots of it.

For more information on the West Nile Virus, please click here.