After I spent more than 50 years chasing and fighting viruses, one fought back and nearly took me down. I speak of the West Nile virus, delivered by the deadliest animal on the planet — the mosquito.

I didn’t get infected during any of my international trips over the years, but most likely while I was outside my home in Washington, D.C. In mid-August I was feeling weak and exhausted, but attributed it to a recent bout with Covid-19. Though I had tested positive for Covid over a month prior, I had experienced a rebound of symptoms after taking the treatment Paxlovid. Perhaps I was still experiencing lingering symptoms that would eventually resolve.

Not so. Instead, I began to experience unexplained, severe fatigue and exhaustion culminating in my admission to a hospital on Aug. 16, delirious and incoherent with a temperature of 103 degrees. I remember little of the five and a half days that I spent in the hospital except that I had never felt so ill in my life. My physicians assumed that I had sepsis and treated me with antibiotics. After several days, my fever subsided, and I was discharged on antibiotics without a clear diagnosis. That changed the next day when blood tests revealed that I had West Nile virus.

There is no treatment for West Nile virus disease, and I was left to deal with its toll on my body. It was terrifying. I could not swing my legs over the side of the bed to sit up without help from my wife and three daughters. I could not stand up without assistance and certainly could not walk. A very scary part of the ordeal was the effect on my cognition. I was disoriented, unable to remember certain words, asking questions of my family that I should have known the answers to. I was afraid that I would never recover and return to normal.