By Sara:
Starting in mid-July, I was sick for a couple weeks with tiredness, headache, and a low
fever. For various reasons which made sense at the time (Anthony also felt a bit sick, the country was in lockdown because Covid was spreading all over, and I was taking the same malaria prophylactics I've taken for 6 years in Uganda without getting malaria...), we assumed I
had Covid and just stayed at home resting and self-isolating. When I
wasn't getting better after those two weeks and suddenly felt way worse, we decided to use one of our home test kits to test me for
malaria and found out that was what I actually had. I always wondered if these test kits we bought had expired or were spoiled since I'd never seen one be positive for malaria, but on that day, it only took a few seconds (you're supposed to wait 20 minutes for the result) to show a positive result. Then we did another test just to make sure, which was probably overkill. But now we know, one positive test is enough to be sure.
Anthony called some
doctors we know and they told us to first go to the Soroti hospital to test for
Covid, then to go to a local clinic so they could advise us on the
malaria treatment. We spent a couple hours waiting at the
hospital to get a Covid test (which, by the way was
negative), then went to the clinic and waited a couple more hours to talk to a doctor, then for them to test and look at my blood under a
microscope to determine the severity of the malaria infestation. It was not a very fun afternoon for me. When
they had the results and a doctor looked at them, it was almost 6pm and
they told us I had to spend the night and the next day there getting
treatment through IV because there were a lot of parasites. A lot. In fact, probably the only reason I could still be on my feet and wasn't way sicker was because the prophylactic I was taking was suppressing the symptoms. This is my smile of reassurance to my family that I was still alive:
For me, the worst part of the experience was having
the cannula (a needle attached to a port to which they attached the IV)
stuck in my hand because needles scare me. Not to mention, one of my friends had recently had the needle break off in her arm when she was having the thing taken out. It freaked me out every time
I looked at my hand. Hopefully it doesn't also freak you out because I'm sharing a picture of it right here:
But we had a nice room at the clinic and the
doctors and nurses took really good care of me. Anthony did too - he did all the talking to doctors, telling people where we were and updating our families, and running home to get all the things we'd need to spend the night there, like drinking water, toilet paper, soap, clothes, pillow, etc. By the next evening, I
felt a lot better. Here's a picture of my room, which had a bed, small table, toilet, and sink (mosquito net was not included, which I thought was ironic considering I was there being treated for malaria):
Friends brought us food for meals at the clinic and tons of
fruit (watermelon, pineapple, bananas, oranges, and mangoes; apparently
juice and fruits are the traditional recovery foods for malaria) and I
got to go home the second evening. I just had to continue taking pills for a
few days as the rest of the treatment. It has been very frustrating to
me to feel weak and tired for so long. I kept wondering why I wasn't
getting much done in a day and realized I was sleeping 15+ hours a day,
which cuts out a lot of productive hours... I also reflected a lot on
how this experience exposed my idols of wanting to be strong and productive. Not
being able to exercise for over a month, feeling tired all the time, and not
being able to get things done made me feel useless. It was a good reminder that I don't have to be useful to have meaning in life, I don't have to be strong to matter to God, and I can be a faithful follower of Christ even when I'm confined to my bed. Additionally, I now have personal experience of what our friends here in Soroti go through regularly. Although they don't usually get such a severe case of malaria as I did, most people we know have malaria at the very least several times a year. It takes a big toll in terms of the cost of the treatment, loss of energy, and sometimes inability to work. So this kind of
development of a malaria vaccine would be incredibly freeing for so many people.
