So Much for Malarone

I YEARN for a bowl of chicken noodle soup. I swear than when I get home, I will never take chicken noodle soup for granted ever again. Right now, I am recovering from being sick as a dog, and all I have is granola bars and water that tastes a bit like plastic. Blech. I could walk for half a mile (if I had the strength) and try to get a bowl of fermented banku with groundnut soup, but that's a lot of effort for something that doesn't sound so great either.

On Sunday afternoon, I was feeling exhausted. Not that I had done anything to warrant being so tired. So, I took a nap. When I woke up an hour later, I started barfing my brains out. By five, my stomach was empty, my bowels were empty, and I exhausted from dehydration and dry heaving. At that point, our nurse Kartee (thank goodness he was around) called a taxi and took me to the hospital.

This was how I came to spend the night in a Ghanaian urgent care clinic. I basically had to be carried into the building because I was so weak, and I got surprisingly little help or sympathy from the nurses who admitted me. They kicked out Kartee and two of my friends who had come along to help. They also put me in the unpleasant position that if I was going to vomit, I had to call out and have them bring me a bucket. They couldn't have just left it with me? Ug, and even if I wasn't going to vomit, the smell of that bucket would have forced me to. It was half-full of the strongest-smelling detergent imaginable and I just choked on the fumes while I heaved.

Before they deserted me for the evening, the nurses put me on a rock-hard bed in the hallway and put in an IV. They alternated between antibiotics and fluids throughout most of the night, and I didn't sleep a wink so I saw every time they changed the bag. Before they kicked out my friends, though, they gave me an injection in my butt cheek that they said would stop my vomiting - and it really did! I don't know what that miracle shot was, but it was impressively effective. It didn't make me feel any better, though.

So, I spent the entire night rolling around on a rock for a bed, desperately thirsty, with an IV in my hand and the much-needed bathroom far too distant. Once when I actually got to the bathroom . . . oh, ok I was going to share gory details, but have just decided against it :) Consider yourself lucky. Needless to say, the nurses were not pleased to clean up the mess that I really couldn't help making :(

Then, at 4:45 in the morning, after the longest night of my life, they moved me upstairs into a wonderfully comfortable bed in a room full of empty comfortable beds! Why the heck had I spent the night in the hallway on a stretcher getting eaten alive by mosquitoes when this room existed?!! I was so angry, but felt like being mad at the indifferent nurses would have been useless. That room wasn't so great once they put me in it, though, because they left the horribly bright lights on and then had the two cleaning guys come in and wash the floor while they blasted hip-hop. AH! I lost so much of my dignity that evening.

Then, FINALLY, around 8, they let Jerome come to check on me. He gave them a few harsh words for not letting him stay with me for the night, and I was glad that he did. Then the nurse informed us that the doctor would be in very soon to look at me. Now do you remember what I've told you about the meaning of "soon" in Ghana? If they told me he would be there "soon" at 8, what time do you think he came? You're right! Noon. The doctor got there at noon.

The doctor seemed just as interested in me as the nurses, but he took a small sample of blood and said he'd come back with the test results. I was expecting to have gastroenteritis from all the potentially dubious street food I'd been eating. However, when he came back an hour later, I looked up at him curiously and he said, "You have malaria parasites."

What?!! Seriously! Seriously? Yale made me purchase the most expensive malaria prophylaxis on the market, and I'd been taking it religiously! And somehow I still had malaria. Oh, and gastroenteritis too. Holy cow. And just the day before, a few volunteers and I had asked one of the UFS nurses if a UFS volunteer had even gotten malaria. He had said no. I guess that means I made Unite for Sight history? Whatever. I was not thrilled.

So, I got sent home from the clinic on Monday, and I was taking a treatment for acute malaria up until Thursday night. The medication that I took was called Coartem, and I think it had more symptoms that the parasites it was killing! I pretty much spent this entire week in bed, unable to eat and miserable. Today, though, I can walk! And as I said earlier, I just want some chicken noodle soup.

I guess the moral of this story is: I got malaria, but I'm ok. I'm on the upswing, so please don't be worried :) I figured I would wait until I was through the worst of it before making this news too public. And as Aaron told me, now I have an excellent war story to tell my grandkids.

Haha. Hope you are all doing well!