Re: Bah!
"I was losing 4kg a day when I caught [Dengue] in an outbreak in Rio a few years back."
Pah! Y' soft Jessie! You want real discomfort, what you need is a bout of Chronic Recurring Pancreatitis!
Not only do you feel like you are being repeatedly stabbed by someone with the attention to detail of a Hanibal Lecter, not only is the pain mitigation done with Demerol - which is addictive and doesn't actually stop the pain, it only makes your brain forget to care about it for the moment - but the doctors will never believe you didn't get your Pancreatitis from long-term chronic alcoholism and will keep hoving into view with gleeful expressions as they run a pool on when you will begin the DTs.
And they will keep asking about your drinking habits and won't believe your answers because the most well-known fact about alcoholics is their propensity for lying about their drinking habits.
So to recap: Not curable, wait-it-out "treatment" regimen, drugs that addle one's wits but do nothing in the way of pain mitigation and earns you a reputation as an alky even though your wife made you quit drinking years before.
Then, when they let you out of hospital and you go to work, shuffling through Pennsylvania Station during the Democratic National Congress, a couple of hundred police officers will eye your zombie-like mein, your pallid, jaundiced complexion, your needle tracks ascending both arms and your prominent phlebitis from the intravenous feeding rig you've been subjected to for a fortnight in entirely the wrong light and label you as a habitual abuser of narcotics instead of a victim of genetics and Mars bars.
Dengue fever? Luxury!