When Antonio got sick he didn’t want to tell anyone. In fact, many close people asked him not to tell anyone. He had just gotten monkeypox and maybe his parents would get nervous or his neighbors or his co-workers or the people who go to his gym or his roommate. “It’s a horrible thing, you feel like you’re burning,” says Antonio on the other end of the phone, discharged a couple of weeks ago, but not fully recovered from the disease and its aftermath. For most of the past month, the 32-year-old political scientist has had to battle with smallpox, but also with misdiagnosis, stigma around his sexual orientation, a silently growing wave of misinformation and the frustration of dealing with a disease that is preventable. , but for which there is no vaccine available in Mexico. That is why, despite all the “don’t tell anyone”, Antonio wants to talk. But he also sets a single condition to do so: that his last name not be mentioned.
The discomfort began in early September, back from a trip abroad. Antonio had walked a long way and came back with discomfort in his groin. The discomfort wouldn’t go away and that’s when he decided to go see a doctor. “He told me it was joint pain, that it was normal and that nothing was wrong,” he recalls. After leaving the private practice, the doctor prescribed a “cream” and sent him to his house.
Shortly after, he began to notice small lesions on his skin, on his back, in the groin and on his buttocks. She had a lot of swelling on her inner thighs and a couple of weeks later she went to see a proctologist with the suspicion that it might be a sexually transmitted disease (STD). Also because more welts appeared on her skin. “That’s when she started the stigmatization,” says Antonio. “He asked me if he had sex and if he had sex with men, but he never asked me if he was top or bottom or if he used protective methods,” he adds. The specialist told him that “it was an STD, but he didn’t know what exactly it was”. “This is common among people who practice what you do,” the proctologist simply said.
Antonio left the office so upset that he asked a friend who is an expert in public health for advice and he recommended him to go to the LGBT+ Clinic, specialized in caring for people of sexual and gender diversity, and told another doctor once again all the symptoms I had. “Surely it is monkeypox [como se llama a la viruela símica en inglés]”, The specialist told him from the beginning. “In the last two months I have received 30, 40, 50 cases a day and they all come for the same reason,” added the doctor. “Everyone is told that it is an STD or that it is a minor thing, but the pain does not go away and it begins to grow a lot.”
The diagnostic questionnaire was very different that last time, without taboos and without judging. “He asked me about my sexual partners, the protection methods I use, if I have a stable partner, if I frequented places of sexual encounter and he gave me a physical examination,” says Antonio. In the end, the doctor had no doubts about the shape and color of the pustules, and about the cases that came to him daily: “This is monkeypox”. The specialist told him that tests for monkeypox were centralized at the Condesa Clinic, a government institution known for treating people with HIV. “Look, if you want a diagnosis that’s 100% accurate, you’re going to have to go to training, have one of the pustules burst and wait seven to ten days, and by then, if this is what you have, It will be completely removed from you, “he recommended.
“You are going to suffer a lot in the next few days,” the doctor warned him and told him that there was no treatment that could give him, that the only thing he could do was prescribe something against the pain. “I was scared and very surprised,” admits Antonio. He knew several gay friends in Europe and the United States that he had given them and in June he paid for a trip to the United States to get the vaccine that he could not access in Mexico. It was free and no questions asked. But he could only get one of the two doses, because the US vaccination policy sought to cover the largest number of people with at least one dose and then provide the boosters.
A few days later, the disease hit him with everything. “I had never felt such strong pain in my life,” says Antonio. It hurt him to move, stand, sit, lie down and go to the bathroom. He couldn’t sleep, didn’t feel like eating, and couldn’t tolerate any rubbing on the pustules. “If someone came a little closer to me, I felt like they were going to move me and then I moved as if by reflex and that hurt me more, it was very complicated,” he says. “You feel horrible discomfort because it’s itchy, but you can’t scratch it because if you do, it leaves marks or it can spread to other parts of your body,” he adds.
Antonio, a young man who works out four times a week and hardly drinks or takes drugs, was doubled over in pain and completely isolated in a room at his boyfriend’s house. “I lost about four or five kilos,” he says. When he couldn’t take it anymore, he had to put on morphine patches. “When I was at my worst, I thought that this was not going to go away, that I would continue with this until November or December,” he confesses. But close to the 21-day cycle of the disease, his pustules erupted on their own, leaving no marks. “It was one of the worst experiences of my life.”
“I don’t know how to tell you when I got infected, but it wasn’t because I caught it, they just don’t give me the dates,” says Antonio. When the pustules were gone and the swelling started to go down, he decided to share his testimony on social media. And there he ran into homophobia and ignorance. “Since it is a disease that is contained mainly among gay men, then people think that it is to be caught and the thing is that, precisely, it is not just to be caught, it is to be in contact with any fluid such as saliva or sweat. ”, he comments. “There’s this idea: ‘it happened to you because you were gay,’ but in reality this could have happened to me regardless of whether I was gay or not, it can happen to anyone, even if you use a condom,” he says. “And if I had happened to fuck, does that take away my right to have access to health?” He questions.
Almost from the beginning, shortly after the first cases were detected in the United States and Mexico last May, the World Health Organization (WHO) had to clarify that monkeypox was not a disease that only affected gays and that it was not necessary to have sex to become infected. Despite everything, the WHO asked homosexuals last July to limit the number of sexual partners, which contributed to the idea that “promiscuity” has been behind the infections. As happened with HIV, these ideas are still present in many people, with a certain charge of puritanism, as if it were a punishment. “It happened to you for being gay,” wrote a social media user. “Part of the stigma is this idea that you deserve it, right?” says Antonio.
Several activists from the LGBT community have demonstrated in Mexico shouting “Vaccines now” to demand that biologicals against monkeypox be acquired, not only for them, but for anyone who wants to get it. The federal government defends that it only has the regular smallpox vaccine in existence and that “in no case is it recommended for the general population,” reads the official page on information about the disease. “It’s as if the government doesn’t care, they don’t see us, it’s as if we don’t exist: there are no vaccines, but not enough information is offered at any of the three levels of government,” Antonio replies. “Almost all the information that reaches you is from friends, from activists or from what is said on social media.”
“And the point is fair that this is not like HIV, there are vaccines, but it is not the priority to buy them, even though it is a disease that can be avoided,” he laments. Two weeks after being discharged, Antonio seeks to resume his life little by little and that his testimony serves so that other people do not have to go through the same thing as him. In early August, health authorities reported 147 confirmed cases in Mexico, according to official data. By the beginning of October, the figure was already 1,968 infected people.
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