Mono — It’s Never Too Late to Come Down With the Cool Kids’ Kissing Disease

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Who the heck did I kiss?

My infectious disease specialist thinks maybe it was my granddaughter. Sounds likely. That baby is cute and loveable and kissy, and she goes to a day care center — a big one with lots of kids, siblings and overworked parents.

Yes, little kids can get mono, the ID specialist assured me. And so could I at the age of 76 — though it might take me longer to get over it than it would a 2-year-old.

The doctor had ordered lab tests, which had found antibodies to the Epstein-Barr virus in my blood. (Later she’d find the virus’s DNA in there, too.) The diagnosis did not surprise me. It came as a great relief, actually. I’d been sick since Thanksgiving. For three months, I’d been moaning to doctors and anyone who’d listen, “I feel like I’ve got mono.”

But nobody believed me, and neither did I, really. Seventy-somethings don’t

get mono. If I was going to come succumb to the Epstein-Barr virus it would have been at the University of Michigan back in the ’60s. Mono is what a socially, but not sexually, active girl like me worried about back in the day — not AIDs, not STDs. Those letters would have meant nothing to me as a Michigan coed.

I’d heard about the symptoms of mono over the years, of course — fatigue and more fatigue. And that’s how I’d been feeling for months, fatigue accompanied by chills and nausea.

My doctors — a string of them — hadn’t thought to test me for mono. They expressed sympathy and looked for sinusitis, pneumonia, and a scary laundry list of gastrointestinal, liver and kidney diseases. I’d had blood tests, chest X-rays, EKGs, an ultrasound and a gastric emptying study — but no diagnosis.

When I finally got in to see the ID specialist, she did test me for mono. Was it because I’d whined once again about how I felt like I had mono? (FYI — that’s one of the things you do when you have mono: you whine a lot.)

I’m good with having mono. Sixty years post adolescence, I’ve finally come down with the cool kids’ disease. And unlike kidney failure or biliary cirrhosis, I’ll get over it. One of these days.

Yes, my encounter with the Epstein-Barr virus is slowing me down. But the heartbreaking truth is, there are far worse diseases out there: “A Case of the Human Condition: When a Young Mother Dies.”  On the lighter side, here’s my take on microbes and the havoc they can wreak on a young family: “How a Mother of Preschool Kids Outwits the Mighty Microbe.”