My Battle with Chickenpox

I didn’t see it coming. One moment I was leading my first Student Council meeting as the new leader of Ministry of External Affairs division, trying to look all composed in a cafe in Bogor, and the next moment I was shivering, throat aching, head pounding so bad I could barely focus on what people were saying. We wrapped up around ten, and all I could think of was my bed.

Ken, my big fluffy orange cat, greeted me at the door like always. He meowed, rubbed against my legs, demanding dinner as if nothing in the world was wrong. I gave him food, showered, and curled up with him for a bit before crashing into sleep. I thought it was just fatigue. But the next morning, something felt off.

My body was burning. My nose was completely blocked. And then, when I lifted my shirt to take a shower, I saw it, one red, blistery bump on my arm, shiny like it was filled with water. My first thought was, What the hell is this? I snapped a photo and sent it to my old friend Ahmad Mundzir, who’s now a med student in Makassar. He replied almost instantly “That looks like chickenpox.”

That one message flipped my whole day upside down. I rushed to the nearest clinic even though my body wanted to collapse. The doctor, who was already preparing to close up for the day, still took the time to see me. He was kind, gave me a quick check, scribbled down a prescription, and shared a few instructions before the doors finally shut. For a moment, I felt relieved, thinking maybe I could handle it. But when I got back, things got ugly fast. For a few days, I even asked my neighbor who also loved cats, to look after Ken because I wasn’t sure I could take care of him. Sometimes though, when I missed him, I’d ask for him back just to have him around.

By evening, my arm wasn’t the only battlefield. Tiny blisters popped up on my face, chest, everywhere. They itched, they burned, and it felt like my body was betraying me piece by piece. I went out to the balcony, clutching my phone while the Qur’an played softly, and I just cried. I whispered "Why now ya Allah??? Why right after my exams???, when I finally had so many plans waiting for me?’ Then I just let the words fade into the night, trusting He knew the answer even if I didn’t.

It's such a shame because there was the ASEAN Golden Generation program in Ciater, Bandung, an event I was so excited to attend after joining the one in Palembang last year (I actually wrote about that Palembang experience in another blog, so if you’re curious, you can check it out, it was such a highlight of 2024 for me). There was the Tax Center anniversary at Gunadarma, a perfect opportunity for me as the new head of my campus’s own Tax Center. The Tax Volunteer Gathering in the West Java III Regional Tax Office was coming up, and to my surprise, they didn’t just look for anyone to perform a monologue, they specifically asked for me. In the end, I couldn’t make it and my senior Silvy took my place, and honestly, she did an amazing job, probably even better than I would have. I even had my Excel certification coming up, one of the big step I couldn’t afford to miss for my degree. But as the days passed and the blisters spread, I could feel my plans slipping through my fingers, one after another, and the thought of missing that exam made my chest tighten.

Still, I couldn’t skip that certification test. Graduation depended on it. So I shaved my head because the blisters had spread there, wore a fedora hat to cover it, put on a mask and a jacket, and dragged myself to campus. I sat all the way in the back, avoiding everyone’s eyes, praying I wasn’t infecting anyone. Every click on Excel felt like a war. But somehow, I passed. That tiny victory meant the world in that moment.

After that, the world shrank to my room. Days blurred into nights. I stopped counting how many blisters I had, or how long I’d been stuck inside of my own bed. Ken never left my side, sometimes purring on my lap, sometimes just watching me with those calm cat eyes, like he knew I was falling apart. Slowly, I began to heal.

The fever broke. The blisters dried. I started to feel human again. But the scars stayed on my arms, on my body, and right on my nose, where one blister burst and left a permanent mark. For weeks, I hated looking in the mirror. The scars felt like proof of my weakness. But then I remembered John Marston, the gunslinger from the game "Red Dead Redemption" who carried his own scars like silent witnesses of every battle he survived. With time, I started to see mine differently too. They became reminders, not punishments. Proof that I made it through something that almost broke me.

Looking back, maybe it had to happen. Maybe I needed to be stopped, forced to slow down, to sit with myself. Because honestly, I had been running non-stop meetings, events, responsibilities, chasing every opportunity I could. Chickenpox knocked me down and made me listen to my body, to my limits, to God. Alhamdulillah, I survived and yeah… I was in so much pain. But maybe that pain was the only way I’d ever learn to pause and breathe.