In recent weeks the Herald’s Pasifika editor Vaimoana Mase has been interviewing families bereaved by the current outbreak of dengue fever in the Pacific. It’s an area she knows all too well: she nearly lost her own life to dengue fever as a child. Here is her story.
Warning: Graphic content
It was the look on my mother’s face that let me know this was bad.
Sitting on the floor of the spare room, the scene around us looked like someone had been stabbed. The carpet was stained with blood - as were my nose, mouth, T-shirt and hands.
My mum had turned white as she stared at me in disbelief. Her eyes were wide with panic as she cupped a shaking hand over my mouth, and blood splattered through her fingers every time I coughed.
Tears streamed down my face. I was struggling to breathe without swallowing blood, but I wasn’t crying just about that.
I was crying because Mum was crying. It was 1995 and I was 8 years old.
My Dad and I had arrived home from a holiday in Samoa the day before. We had gone there to visit my Grandma and wider aiga at Dad’s village in Toamua, Faleata.
It was my first trip to Samoa since I was a toddler. Two weeks of fun in the hot sun, village life and chores, yummy island food and hanging out with my cousins. Bliss.
But a day at the beach about an hour away - kuā, we called it - would result in a time my mother still cries about. The mere memory brings tears.
I remember parts of that day at the beach - sprinting into the water as soon as we arrived and only getting out to eat the BBQ the parents had cooked up on the sand.
There are photos of that day in an album back in Samoa - my cousins and I lining up in the shallows, striking wannabe-bodybuilder poses. Splashing water everywhere. Laughter. The best day.
The rest of that trip was spent on a mattress on the sitting room floor at the house, nearly always asleep. Fatigued. Sore joints. Sore head. Sore body. Every time I sat up it felt like a chore - my head almost too heavy for me to lift.
I learned how to swallow tablets - Panadol - on that trip. Other than the traditional fōfō (massages) I was given, I was not taken to the hospital. My late dad used to say they never realised how serious it was.
A care package from Mum arrived with a relative that week. Inside, my childhood favourite chocolate bar: Snickers. Not even that enticed me. No appetite.
My mum still remembers seeing me walking out of the airport arrivals gate in Auckland. Already a gangly child, she was shocked at how much weight I’d lost. One thing that stood out, she said, were my legs - riddled with dark dots of what she knew to be old mosquito bites.
I could hardly stand upright, let alone walk. My eyes drooped and I wasn’t my happy self, she said, describing the hug I gave her as “weak”.
The next day would reveal exactly how sick I was.
The spare room is at the back of the house. I vividly remember looking up to see my mother running down the hallway to the kitchen, before racing back holding a large plastic bowl she thrust in front of me.
That bowl was about to be filled almost to the rim with blood clots.
Mum called an ambulance and then the Cheap Cabs’ Base to get a message to my dad - a taxi driver - to come home urgently.
We would pass his car on the way to the hospital.
As the paramedics rushed to get me into the ambulance, Mum was still holding the big plastic bowl - she put it down on the kitchen bench as we left.
My dad used to talk about what it was like walking into the home and kitchen to see that. “Fa’alogo atu ua leai se mea i lo’u magava.” Loosely translated: his stomach dropped.
No note. Just a big bowl of blood clots - and then the memory of the speeding ambulance he had passed on his way home.
I spent three days in hospital. The doctor told Mum their daughter was “very lucky” as the dengue fever symptoms had reached a point of severity close to the worst case scenario - death.
I’ve only recently learned of the guilt my dad carried for many years afterwards. My mum speaks of their sleepless nights, tears and the prayers they said for their only child to live.
Seeing families in our motherland of Samoa, and the wider Pacific, going through what my parents went through is so painful.
Knowing the local hospitals are filled with children fighting this disease is heartbreaking.
And realising families are starting to bury their children - at least one family forced to say goodbye to two sons - is devastating.
Reporting about the rising death toll having survived the disease is difficult.
Dengue fever can be unforgiving. I was lucky we returned home when we did. I was lucky to be able to be treated in New Zealand. I was lucky to survive.
Vaimoana Mase is the Pasifika editor for the Herald’s Talanoa section, sharing stories from the Pacific community. She won junior reporter of the year at the then Qantas Media Awards in 2010 and won the best opinion writing award at the 2023 Voyager Media Awards.