Malaria

“There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. 

There’s a reasonable shot that because of his money we will cure malaria.”   

~Malcolm Gladwell

I’ve been contemplating whether or not I should write this blog post, but I’ve decided that I have to. Being a Peace Corps volunteer isn’t all fun and games; there are many difficulties and one of them is staying healthy. I want my blog to ring true, reflecting both the highs and lows of my time here in Togo. After a year of successfully avoiding malaria, it finally caught me. I’ve never felt so sick in my life.

It all started with an excruciating headache one day. Then I woke up in the middle of the night with a fever, shakes, and chills like I’ve never had before. The next day I called my PC doctors and they told me to get a malaria test done at the hospital in Kpalime, which came back negative. That afternoon I had a repeat fever like the night before, only this time it was a little worse, 103.5. I was lying on my couch in a fleece jacket, wrapped in a blanket on an 85-degree day and still couldn’t stop shivering. I felt like I was going to die. I called the doctors back. They instructed me to go down to Lome the next day. I woke up feeling horribly nauseous, and the paralyzing headache was back. Next was a two-hour car ride squished into the back seat with three other people, thinking I was going to puke the whole way. I just had to keep telling myself “don’t throw up, don’t throw up, don’t throw up.” I saw my doctors in Lome, who determined a positive diagnosis and started the medicine. My first tests were negative, because malaria starts in the liver and isn’t detectable until it reaches the bloodstream. At first I wasn’t able to keep the medicine down. I spent the rest of that day in bed trying not to move because of my headache. Any tiny movement amplified the headache, so I tried to stay as still as possible. The next day I was able to re-start the medicine and keep it down. With each day the headache became weaker and weaker. It still took a week or so to feel normal again.

So that’s my malaria story. I hope there will be no sequels. It was not fun, but I am lucky I had access to good care. Since it’s the rainy season right now, there are more mosquitoes and more cases of malaria throughout the region. Within the last month five volunteers, including me, have gotten malaria in Togo. We volunteers are provided treatment, but that is not the case for many Africans. Thousands of children die from malaria every day in Africa. Bill Gates has devoted much time and millions of dollars to develop drug treatments, insecticides, and other techniques for controlling mosquitoes, such as the distribution of bed nets for sleeping, and working towards a safe and effective malaria vaccine. Bill and Melinda Gates are two of my heroes. They are selflessly working very hard to make this a world where EVERYONE has a chance to have a story with a happy ending when fighting diseases like malaria.