ON A Thursday morning in early November, four days after he had returned from a holiday in Vietnam, Luke Ablett began to experience the symptoms. "I just woke up feeling a bit cold, a bit feverish," says the Swans midfielder. "Like a really bad flu."

At first, Ablett was not concerned. He had often felt a bit sick after returning from overseas. But a few hours later his condition had deteriorated.

"I was just flat on my back, I felt like I was going to die," he says. "It just felt that bad."

For the next few days, Ablett moved only occasionally from his bed to the toilet, unable to eat and suffering debilitating back pain. It was not until more than a week later and after a series of blood tests that he was diagnosed with dengue fever, a mosquito-borne illness increasingly common in Asia, Africa and, he has discovered, parts of northern Australia.

"I guess dengue fever is still not that common, so they checked for malaria and a few other things first," Ablett says.

"It was pretty bad waiting to find out. They call it the bone-breaker because it can make your joints ache pretty badly. That was probably the worst part of it."

For the first eight days of his illness, Ablett could not eat at all. By the time he reported for pre-season training, he had lost seven kilograms.

"I was in a pretty bad way," he says. "Tom Hanks from Castaway was the most common thing I got [from the players]. I guess the only good thing was it's a nice change from having to lose weight in the pre-season like I usually have to."

The most frustrating thing for Ablett was that there is no treatment for dengue fever. Rather, he had to wait for the fever and aches and pains to gradually subside. At first he could walk only four laps of the oval as his teammates trained, frustrating for the 26-year-old who had hoped to get a strong head start to 2009 after a couple of injury-disrupted years.

"I'd had the knee op and I was pretty ready to get back into full training," he says. "It was pretty frustrating at first, I just didn't have any energy."

While Ablett says there are now no lasting effects from the illness for his football other than the delayed start to training, dengue fever sufferers are at high risk if they contract the illness a second time - something that will curtail the travel plans of a man adventurous enough to go to Vietnam by himself rather than to the traditional end-of-season-trip destinations.

Ablett said he would also be unlikely to play games in northern Queensland or Darwin should the Swans by drawn there in pre-season competition matches.

"You would have to check out the situation with local hospitals, but I doubt that I'd play," he says.

"If you get it again, they say you could possibly die because your body reacts violently to having the disease again. So no more low-lying tropical areas. What is a bit frightening is that, having had dengue fever, you take more notice about it and I've seen some reports of a big epidemic in Cairns and, with global warming, they reckon it could come as far south as Sydney."

There was another slight scare for Ablett last weekend when the Victorian bushfires came close to his parents' farm near Drouin.

However, while they had the car packed with papers and family heirlooms, the fire skirted their property, which is situated mostly in grassland.

Now, after an unfortunately eventful time, Ablett's focus is on having a strong impact on the Swans' performance this season after two years which he acknowledges have been "pretty disappointing".

Ablett was this week re-elected to the Swans leadership group, having been elevated for the first time last season. That was an indication of the high regard with which a player who has not enjoyed a high profile outside the club is held by his teammates.

However, while honoured by the acknowledgement, he wants to return to the form that made him an important member of the 2005 and 2006 grand final teams. "It was good last year, even though we [leadership group] had a lot of off-field things to deal with," he says. "But as a leader you're judged partly by your performances and your impact on the field and I want to be able to do that."