My Scariest Moment in Africa

My Scariest Moment in Africa

24^th January 2006
Africa can be a scary place at times. It is a land I don't really understand and sometimes I do things that I really shouldn't be doing.

But what about my scariest moment? There are some good candidates including:

But they all come a distant second. The following is my scariest moment in Africa.

Scariest Moment
I was in my room at my new home at Rose's place. I was sick and I was not a happy chappy. I was going through very hot spells where the sweat would form little rivulets on the hairs of my arm, and very cold spells where my teeth would chatter uncontrollably. I was lying prone on my bed and any little movement - such as raising my head - would make me nauseous. Nauseous, but not necessarily vomiting. I remember asking Rose to bring me a banana so that I could scoff in down and try to induce vomiting.

I was obviously not well and I was just a little scared. I had gone a couple of days earlier to the clinic in Jinja. The doctor took my temperature (38 degrees) and listened to my symptoms before diagnosing me with malaria and prescribing me some anti-malarial medication.

What was scaring me was that the doctor didn't actually test me for malaria. "If in doubt, diagnose malaria!" seems to the catch cry of African doctors everywhere. What if it was something else? Typhoid perhaps? Cholera? Hepatitis? I had no idea. The fact was that I was going downhill and downhill fast and something had to be done.

I called Rose and Lee to my room. I told them I was scared and something needed to be done.

So, they organised some boda-boda's for us (a car would of been too hard to organise) and we headed off to Jinja hospital. I was very weak by this stage. My appetite was shot and my energy levels were practically zero. I managed to walk into the hospital, but only just. My legs were very wobbly. Rose and Lee explained what was happening while I found a bench to lie on. A blood test followed and what everybody except me thought to be true, turned out to be true. I had malaria.

I suspect I had malaria in Ghana as well. It gets a very minor mention here. Now, I only suspect it was malaria in Ghana, because it was nothing like was I was experiencing now.

The test results for malaria are scaled from one to four, four being the worst. My test gave a result of one. I would hate to think what four would of been like.

Since I was obviously weak and very ill, they decided to admit me to hospital. They stuck an IV in me, and pumped me full of anti-malarial medication in addition to some re-hydration stuff.

The hospital in Jinja was seriously under funded. They lacked:

Bed linen
Rose had to bring me some linen from her place.
Food
Rose had to keep me supplied with juice and food, both of which I couldn't really handle
Tourniquets
The nurse had to tie a rubber glove around my wrist so that the veins in my hands would pop up.

Those were the things that I noticed were missing. I'm sure the lacked many other things.

I stayed in the hospital for two nights before returning to Rose's place and making a slow recovery.

The malaria wiped me out for almost two weeks. It is only now that I am started to feel normal again and this is why there have been no crazymalc.co.nz updates for a while. I've just been too weak to type.

Eating practically nothing for two weeks also took its toll. I'm lost 10 kg and now weigh 80 kg. When I left New Zealand I weighed 95 kg.

I think I caught the malaria on my trip to Murchison Falls, an area that I now know is notorious for malaria. I had stopped taking my anti-malarial medication. Pumping an antibiotic into my body everyday seemed quite foolish. Bad for the kidneys and the West is already too dependant on antibiotics. All long term foreigners in Africa seem to do the same thing. They don't take the anti-malarial and just deal with the malaria when it pops up.

All in all, I could of done without getting malaria. It sucked....

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