Caboose

On Tuesday I wasn’t feeling very well, it started with an entertaining case of the runs and then I just started feeling generally ill. I spent the afternoon sitting around my room at the conference centre, feeling achy and alternately hot and cold.

Yesterday morning things hadn’t improved, so I went to the NTI clinic. The doctor decided I probably had malaria, plus something else that had caused the diarrhoea. He gave me some tablets for the malaria, told me to increase my dosage of doxycycline to see if that killed off the gut bugs and sent me to the on-site lab for a blood test.

The blood test results came back this morning and it’s definitely malaria. It looks like it was caught early and the tablets seem to be working, I’m feeling much better today. I’m not sure if the taking my malaria prophylaxis every day has reduced the severity of the malaria or if it’s just luck, but I’ll certainly keep on taking my daily doxycycline.

I’m convinced the cause was the large number of mosquitoes in my room, due to the huge gap between the air-conditioner and the wall. I’ve been spraying bug spray around every night but as soon as it wears off more of them come in. I complained to the hotel and they did nothing. Instead I bought a newspaper and used it to fill in the gap, looks like it was too late though.

Getting malaria is probably some kind of VSO Nigeria rite of passage, like falling in a drainage ditch (which I haven’t, yet).