Now, before coming to Africa, I knew all about the precautions one should take to prevent getting malaria:
- take anti-malarial medication (check - I'm on doxycycline, a pill that I take once a day)
- sleep under a mosquito net (check)
- cover your skin while outside after sundown to prevent mosquito bites (check - plus, I don't spend a lot of time outdoors after dark anyway)
So, when I had a mild headache last Thursday morning and felt not quite myself, I figured I had eaten some food that was slightly off, which is not an uncommon occurrence. Or maybe I had caught some little flu bug that was going around. I took my temperature throughout the day and it was hovering between 99 and 100, which really isn't that high, and it didn't seem to be going up. Later that day, after a nap, I felt better and whatever trace of a fever I had was gone.
The same thing happened on Friday. Woke up, didn't feel right, had a tiny bit of a fever, just a hint of nausea, a few aches and pains, but that was it. They never seemed to get worse, and the temperature would come and go. My wife strongly encouraged me to go to get tested for malaria, but I thought that if I had malaria, the symptoms would present themselves and get worse. Instead I felt like I was being teased by them. Again, by the afternoon the symptoms were gone. I was on the medication, I'm taking all the steps to prevent getting bitten, so what did I have to worry about?
On Saturday and Sunday, I felt fine. Totally fine. "Well, whatever that was, I'm glad it's over with," I thought. That Sunday night, though, I started having terrible headaches. They were so strong that they would wake me up. Now I started to wonder if something was up because I almost never get headaches, especially ones so bad they wake me up.
So, Monday morning I headed off to the clinic to get tested for malaria. My wife met me there and helped with translating since I was having a hard time thinking straight due to these headaches. The clinic was clean and relatively modern - after a bit of a wait, they brought me into an exam room and took a tiny blood sample to run the test. The nurse asked me all kinds of questions and took my temperature. I didn't have any of the usual symptoms such as the chills, high fever, digestive problems, cough, runny nose, etc. It takes about a half hour for them to do the test, so I met with the doctor while I was waiting.
He was very nice and spoke excellent English which was a blessing. He, too, didn't see many symptoms and was wondering if my eyeglasses were bad, or if there was some other reason why I would be having headaches. While he went to get the test results, I asked my wife if she seriously thought I had malaria. She said no, and I said I didn't think so either. How could I have gotten it? We haven't been back here that long, I take the pills every day, I don't remember being bitten at all in the past few weeks... it didn't add up.
So, you can imagine our surprise when the doctor came back and said that yes indeed, I tested positive. I guess the anti-malarial medication was keeping my symptoms at a minimum, but it was definitely in my blood. He wrote me a prescription for some medicine to take care of the malaria, told me to take Tylenol and Advil for the headaches, and said I should come back on Friday for another test to see if I still have it.
As soon as that night, I started feeling better. I finished taking the medicine last night and after getting up this morning and not taking anything, the only effects I still feel are that my eyeballs are a little sore. Otherwise I feel fine. Normal appetite, no headaches, fever, chills, etc.
What's so strange is that here, malaria isn't treated as a big deal. 500 million people a year are infected with it and one million of those go on to die from it, so it's not some unknown disease. Yet when people in Africa talk about having it, it seems to be regarded about the same as getting chicken pox. I suppose that's because it's so common here and it's so easy to get treatment for it. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm incredibly lucky because under different circumstances, I could be in the hospital or worse right now. I'm very fortunate that things didn't get any more serious for me and the cure is as simple as taking some pills twice a day for a few days.
At any rate, I'm feeling much better, and I guess that years from now when I'm seated in my wingback chair, filling my pipe with tobacco, and getting ready to regale my visitors with tales from my life, I can get a faraway look in my eye and say, "Back when I had malaria in west Africa..."
