At least it's not malaria....
on Tales from a Mud Hut (Cameroon), 17/Sep/2008 10:33, 34 days ago
It started at around 2:30am on Monday.  I awoke to find myself sweating profusely and barely able to breathe within the stifling confines of my mosquito net.  The fan had been turned off in our room and with five people and the accumulation of a day's heat it was like trying to sleep in a furnace.  Eventually I gave up, smothered myself in insect repellant and went outside.  There I settled into a plastic deck chair and listened to the distant Ramadan prayers and the shrieks of giant bats.  My whole body ached, my skin felt sore and even my eyeballs hurt - I knew something was wrong, yet for some reason I had neither the energy nor the incentive to wake someone and ask for help.  Eventually the mosquitoes became too much and I staggered back into the room and collapsed on my bed where I managed maybe half an hour's fitful sleep.Forcing myself to go to the bathroom, I found that I couldn't make it back to the top bunk and so slumped into another volunteer's recently vacated bed.  She returned from breakfast a little confused as to why I would have chosen her bed over my own.  I mumbled my symptoms at nobody in particular; all I wanted to do was sleep, but when our resident returned volunteer pointed out that these were precisely the symptoms of malaria, it was decided that something had to be done.  At first the inference was that I would have to travel to the local hospital on the back of a mototaxi (literally, a motorbike taxi), braving the thunderstorm that had just erupted outside and was in the process of drowning the entire city.  This decision was mercifully overruled and a VSO car came to pick me up.  Diana, another volunteer, was showing similar symptoms, so we headed off to the hospital together, competing on the back seat over who could appear the most anaemic and floppy.Malaria is apparently business as usual in Cameroonian hospitals.  I described my symptoms in rapidly deteriorating French, was weighed (I had already lost three kilos) and had my temperature and blood pressure measured; a prick of blood was taken from my finger for testing, other tests were carried out and finally I was asked to return at around 2pm for the results.  I went back to the Mission, forced some rehydration salts down and immediately felt better, so I wasn't surprised when 2pm came and it turned out that I didn't have malaria.  "Amoebas," said the doctor, examining his findings.  "You have to be very careful about what you eat and drink - nofruit, no tap water - wash everything carefully in filtered water."  He drew the same conclusion from Diana's results and prescribed us both with several boxes of chalky, foul-tasting, over-priced pills.I thought that would be the end of it but apparently it was only the beginning.  Every time I think I'm getting better, I suffer a relapse within half an hour.  The medication makes everything taste awful, the result being that I have no appetite and can only stomach the blandest of food - even rice is unbearable.  A trip to the kitchen to get water or bread necessitates asiesta of at least half an hour to recover from so much walking.  My body is a human blender.  All in all, the shiny veneer of Africa has been tarnished somewhat by the experience, but I'm optimistic that it'll redeem itself in due course.  And it hasn't been all bad.  My employers and VSO havegiven me all the time I need to recover.  And really it couldn't have come at a better time, as I'm surrounded by volunteers with nothing to do but wait for their placements to start and satisfy my every whim in the meantime.  They've all been fantastic, especially Grahame, who accompanied Diana and me to the hospital, made us food and rehydration salt solutions, let me sleep in his room for hours with the fan on and has been keeping a constant eye on us to make sure we eat properly.  He deserves a medal and all he gets from me is muttered grumbling when he tries to force feed me bananas.I'm beginning to realise that this year is going to be far more challenging than I had ever anticipated....