Our apologies for the dearth of blog posts lately. We have been traveling in some remote parts of Uganda, and I have had something of a head cold (stop worrying! I promise it is not ebola), which seemed to take up residence right in the space between the part of my brain that thinks up words and the part of my brain that commands my fingers to type. Good news: the Uganda “Day Nurse/Night Nurse” pill combination1 that I’ve been taking is proving pretty effective in chasing it away.
Anyway, it segues nicely into the next part of our trip: that time we got really sick in Malawi.
Marc and I have been pretty healthy here in Africa. We’ve come down with the odd headache or case of sniffles (and the abovementioned instant cold), but nothing either very serious or inconvenient. A few days into our second stay at Mayoka Village in Nkhata Bay, however, Marc started complaining about feeling achy. I immediately thought malaria.
Allow me to quote Lonely Planet’s section on infectious diseases: “Malaria’s early stages include headaches, fevers, generalised aches and pains, and malaise, which could be mistaken for flu.” Perhaps you remember our post on things we will no longer take for granted, where we showcased the following warning: PRESUME YOU HAVE MALARIA UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE. Should I note that this warning was included in an informational pamphlet in our room at Mayoka Village?
Making me even more nervous was the fact that we had forgotten to take our anti-malarial pills2 for the previous two days. Anti-malarials can sometimes simply mask the symptoms of malaria, and I was worried convinced that Marc had previously contracted malaria and we were just now discovering it because we had skipped our meds for the past couple of days.
The Mayoka Village pamphlet including the stark warning also noted that there was a medial clinic in town that conducted malaria tests, and so we got directions from the owner and set off. The malaria test was cheap (1500 kwacha, or less than $4.00) and relatively simple (although, of course, I’m not the one who had to give blood): just a prick of the finger, and then we waited for the test to develop. One line meant malaria-free; two lines meant malaria.
Only one line appeared. Relieved, we headed home.
I’d like to say that Marc began improving immediately, but, unfortunately, things got worse before they got better. Within a few hours of returning home, I started to feel sick as well, and, by the evening, we were both laying in bed with aches and feverish chills. Of course, it was that night that the morons whose tent was set up directly behind our chalet decided to stay up all night drinking and then jump into the lake – loudly – at two in the morning, but that’s another story.
We spent another day convalescing at Mayoka Village, but once we felt slightly better we hit the road again. Next stop: Tanzania!
1 Basically, just Nyquil/Dayquil tablets.
2 Before leaving for Africa, we each picked up 90-day prescriptions for Atovaquone-Proguanil, the generic version of Malarone, which is taken daily. As a side note, Marc’s Duane Reade prescription receipt cheerily noted that, after a $30 copay, his insurance was picking up the remaining portion of the medication’s cost –allegedly, an additional $450.89. The absurdity of such pricing for a generic antimalarial, however, is well beyond the scope of this blog.
