One beautiful morning, almost two weeks after first getting sick, the sun came out. It was an incredible feeling of freedom. I emerged from the covers, took a lovely hot shower, and took Henry for a walk to the beach. My time with cabin fever was finally over. 

While being glad I was no longer depressed and bored, I decided to research “Cabin Fever.” It is amazing the fun facts one can find! Cabin fever is a malady of the mind induced by long-term monotony and characterized by feelings of irritation, restlessness, and loneliness. I had all of those emotions.

Typhoid Fever was associated with cabin fever because of a famous case of an Irish American cook who unknowingly infected between fifty and One hundred and twenty-two people through her food. Mary Mallon, or Typhoid Mary, was forced into cabin-like isolation on more than one occasion. She died after almost thirty years of quarantine. This led to the association between the disease and cabin fever. 

It was a woman, B. M. Bower, a pen name for Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, who first coined the phrase “Cabin Fever” in 1918 with the publication of her novel Cabin Fever, about a man who felt suffocated by being a husband and father and leaves his family to go prospecting with a man named Cash.

Being able to be outside again felt great. Sunlight increases our levels of serotonin, the mood-boosting neurotransmitter. My feelings of irritability and depression disappeared, trapped indoors, I read and watched a lot of television, which meant I wore my glasses almost all day. Being outside, I could take them and relax.  I could feel my mind and body smiling again. 

The weather has been mild in my part of the Pacific Northwest so far this winter. The Beauty Berry Bush still holds its purple metallic berries. Both my red  (Jelena) and my fragrant yellow, Arnold Promise, Witch hazels are blooming, and the Hellebores are blooming under the leaves as I left on this winter.

It felt like a springtime afternoon, walking with Henry to the beach. The sun shone on the silent, calm waters of the Puget Sound. The Alder trees glowed with the light, and I counted ten herons in the trees. Along one side of the trail’s edge were snowberries in abundance.