April 25th is World Malaria
and this day has a lot more meaning to it for me since I have suffered from
malaria myself. It is 4 days I will never forget in my Peace Corps service.
Here was a little about my firsthand
experience with malaria…One late afternoon/early evening on s Saturday in the
beginning of February 2012 I felt a little off. My neck and back were sore and
I just felt really fatigued, but I didn’t think much of it because the previous
2 days I had done a lot of biking and just thought it was because of that that
I was feeling sore achy and tired. The next day, I still felt really tired and
sore and just overall really weak, which again I thought was due to biking and
just stress from the village life. The only new thing that happened to me that
day was that I didn’t really have much of an appetite. Still I had no clue I
was suffering from malaria because I slept under a mosquito net every night and
I took malaria prophylaxis medicine.
That Sunday night was awful for me, I
woke up with a fever and would wake up alternating feeling hot and then cold.
Monday morning I woke up with a fever of 104 and a splitting headache plus an
overall weak and fatigued feeling. Once I woke up with the headache between my
eyes I thought, “Wait, could this be malaria?” So I went and read my PC Medical
handbook and saw that I was missing only 2 of the symptoms but very strongly
had everything else including headache between the eyes, fever, sweats and
chills, fatigue, aches and pains. So I went and took a malaria test at my local
clinic and the result came back negative because of my prophylaxis medicine so
I took the Coartem to kill the parasite in my blood.
The next 3-4 days were the worst I have
felt in my entire life and I am not even being dramatic by saying that. And
since I take the prophylaxis medicine I was told my malaria was just “ break
through” malaria and supposedly less intense, but I hope that is not true
because if that was only a bit of malaria I don’t know how people survive the
full force.
The worst was just doing something small
and feeling so exhausted by doing that. I didn’t really get out of bed for
those 3 days and I was still so tired. I had no appetite so I am pretty sure I
lost between 5-7lbs, and the worst thing with malaria is that it’s cyclic which
means that maybe in the morning you feel okay so you start moving around a bit,
but by the afternoon you feel as if it’s your first day with malaria all over
again. Then for me about a week after I was still feeling some of the effects
of the malaria but this time with severe pain in my joints, specifically my
knees. Bending my legs and walking was so painful!
Even with all this coming from such a
small insect I survived and sadly to say many people in Sub-Saharan Africa,
especially children, don’t survive. Many don’t have access to nets, or when
they go to the clinic they find there is no medicine available to kill the
parasite, or I found in my community some people think all they need is rest to
cure malaria and therefore don’t make it to the clinic to get the needed
medicine.
Stomping Out Malaria in Africa is a Peace Corps initiative that uses
strategic partnerships, targeted training Volunteers and intelligent use
of information technology to support the local malaria prevention
efforts of over 3,000 Volunteers
in sub-Saharan Africa. For more information go to stompoutmalaria.org and follow Stomp activities at http://www.facebook.com/
