Sunday, October 19, 2008

Malaria strikes...

Early yesterday morning I woke up with my first ever case of malaria. I felt feverish and really thirsty. In the afternoon a nurse who lives nearby came over and made a couple of blood slides. It's always best to get your slides read by more than one person here. Then Hugo brought them off to two local apotik's (pharmacy). The results were in a bit late as the power was off from early in the morning until 6:00 at night. Fun, fun! The one apotik said that I have malaria tersiana +1 and the other one said that I have malaria tropika +1. I talked to a nurse and she informed me that you can actually have both at the same time. The problem with lab techs here is that they don't keep looking for parasites on the slide once they've found one. So there's a great possibility that I have both. I'm taking a new drug that was brought in for us by some of the nurses called artemether. However, it doesn't necessarily kill the tersiana parasite. So if I don't feel like I'm getting better after a few days I need to go and get another slide done and possibly take quinine... Let's hope I don't need to do that...
I'm feeling a little better today, at least for now. Malaria is cyclical and you will feel better for maybe the whole day and then at say, 5:00, the symptoms will reappear and you crash.

4 comments:

Pearl said...

Sorry to hear you caught that nasty bug. It's worse when Mom's out of commission. We'll pray you recover quickly.

Nancy-Mom said...

We to wish you all the best and pray for a quick recovery.

Irma said...

Ahhh Erica...I sure hope and pray that'll you bounce back quickly! Take care.

Mary said...

Good to hear that you are feeling better...but that doesn't mean you go back to regular activity does it...you still have to take it easy for a bit to make sure it is really gone. We continue to pray that you may recover fully to take care of your loved ones.