Out of Canada, Into Kenya - Shawn's Journal

Better Than Malaria

On Saturday morning, I woke up at 3:30am feeling quite awful. My entire body ached like it never had before. I wasn’t able to fall back asleep and by the time we were able to get a hold of a thermometer at 8:00, my temp was 102.5. I could hardly move. If I closed my eyes, it felt like they were burning from the heat of my own body, if I opened them, it felt like they were going to explode from the pressure inside my body. We were pretty sure it was malaria, but decided to go to the hospital and make sure.

During the two hours that I had to wait for a ride to the hospital, I seriously thought I might die. I have never hurt so much. Finally we were picked up and driven to the nearest hospital which was an hour away (this is in a major city, too). We were attended to pretty quickly - details of the hospital may come later - but then after the blood test we had to wait another hour before getting the results. This is in a packed, smelly, un-air-conditioned waiting room. The temperature outside was at least 85 (around 30 or so celsius) with 100% humidity. My temp was still hovering around 102.

Long story short, I didn’t have malaria as we had expected. It was an upper-respiratory bacterial infection. I’m now on 6 (!) different medications and finally today my fever went below 100. Danielle ended up coming down with it today, but not before getting stung by sea urchins. So, we’re recovering. I’m doing better than she is (right now Marcia is playing surgeon and trying to extricate the sea urchin stingers). All said, we aren’t really complaining and the trip is going great. Seriously. More tomorrow, including more photos - goodnight.

Posted by slvrfrg at July 12, 2004 08:03 PM