9th Sep

9th Sep

‘Come home’ you guys said.
‘Maybe you should come back’ my Clinical advisor said.
‘Maybe call it a day’ Janet said.
‘Malaria! That shit kills’ Simone said

Thank you for all your texts guys but NO WAY AM i COMING HOME, im here till the bitter end, and I can happily report that I am feeling much better. The fever broke early this morning, im still really weak and have the remnants of a headache but I am tonnes better. Malaria, is a great mimic and deceiver. I initially thought that I had a cold but there was something about the headache that made me think otherwise, man alive, the headache, i think it is the worse thing about Malaria (except from it being a killer infection). It paralyses you, ya cant move ya eyes, ya head ya neck for the fear of the intense throb that follows any upper body movement. You feel as though ya eyes are gonna drop out of ya head, like ya brain is actually pushing up against the inside of ya head behind ya eyes. Wow it hurt, and the pain doesn’t subside with painkillers, and I think thats what made me think that something was really wrong. The problem with malaria also is that the pain and pure fatigue come in periodic bursts. So for like two hours ya feel like warmed up poo and then ya better for four hours and then ya ill again. Even on the Meds, but eventually, the feeling of being well is longer than the feeling of utter poo. Except if you leave it untreated the feelings of shittness kinda run into each other and by then its too late to do anything as ya too tired and prob unconscious. I know ive made a bit of a joke about all this but I really did feel like I was dying. Dragging my self to the hospital was exactly that, sweating in the afternoon sun and taking baby step to the hospital, never before have I ever felt the sensation of ‘not being able to walk any further’. Every step I took was exhausting and having to have thirty second rest after ten or so steps must have looked ridiculous to any passers by! But I had to get to the hospital and so I guess sheer willpower and background thoughts of impending death like an invisible pulleys, dragged me along.
Well I don’t think that I should really go in to the hospital until my energy levels are better, as I am only able to do things in really short intense bursts. I managed to clean the house (sweep the floor) in ten minutes then rest. Had a wash in 5 minutes (loving the cold shower now, as its hot here now), then rest did my washing in 30 minutes. Wicked now chilling for the rest of the day.
So I survived a killer disease!!! My body seems to be an excellent host for parasites, first worms now malaria.
Annoyingly, all the villages keep asking me why I haven’t returned to work yet. Ive explained like a million times that once ive finished the medication and feel a bit better that I will. They seem to think that now I have the med il be ok. I mean I am okay but this is my first malaria attack, all these women have had it at least once or twice a year and the more you get it the less severe the course and so for some reason they think itl be perfectly okay for me to stumble my poor body around the hospital because I have the medication. Also annoyingly, one of the women told me that I had to give one of the women money to pay for her malaria treatment. Love these women but today i was done with the being told what to do. I said rather sharply that she must never ask me for money again otherwise I will buy nothing from her ever again. Sounds a bit harsh i know, but these women have enough money to get by and they just cant get it into their heads that I am not here in Kenya on bloody holiday (ok so i had a week off) BUT i feel that Im doing my bit in the hospital, I made a donation to the charity as a part of the elective payments, i buy all my food off these women and tip them I mean i am not handing out my cash willy nilly, and unfortunately for me previous elective students have had spare cash and have just thrown money about willy nilly, but i cant and wont and from today Im gonna have harsh words for women who rather rudely ask me for money.

Im def better cause im ready for a BITCH!. Another medical student is in the house with me, much to my annoyance, as I kinda wanted some time alone for a bit. As its just me and her Im glad she has decided to sleep in the other room just so I can have some space. Ergh its a bit annoying cause all the medical students that have been here have only been here for a few weeks before going onto other areas of Kenya or returning home, and word has got out that ive been here for a while and will I quote ‘look after’ any new arrivals. Aint my job mate. First person who came along, fine. Il show you the ropes. But 4th student down the line. Cant be bothered.. i know I sound like a selfish cow BUT they don’t clean, they don’t wash up, they don’t tidy. I had to learn the ropes myself, I had to get lost on the way home and sort myself out. Ive had to haggle prices down, approach village women , make friends with the neighbours all bloody alone. Ive had to kill cockroaches, swat bees, de mossy my room, hand wash my clothes and work out general living by my bloody self, and these new students have got it into their head that im gonna let them follow me around. Its annoying. Cooking don’t get me started. Im not the biggest fan of cooking, and with limited foodstuffs here ive had to be creative with eggs, tomatoes, bread, rice and not much else. Many of the students here have either an air of, im loaded and am not very domesticated or im scared of my own shadow. Its really annoying. Like one of the girls wouldn’t use the toilet after 5. Another decided that she must clarify everything with me before she did it. Another waited till I got home to see what I cooked for my dinner, then went out and bought the same stuff and cooked the same meal. Another moaned that daddy wasn’t ringing her as much as she would like and this weeks medic has decided that she is also ill (with it seems like-I cant be bothered to work out the bus route myself itis) and wont go into the hospital, despite me actually being genuinely ill, until she can go with me. Yawn city. Look yeah this is bitchy but this is our elective, an opportunity to grow up ya know, let go of our creature comforts and survive and frankly ive been rather annoyed with some of the people ive had to endure during this adventure. OKAY, people are different and take their own times to settle in blah blah blah i get it, but im the one that had the shits, im the one that has sleep with cockroaches, im the one that had strangers knocking on my window in the night and im the one with malaria. NONE of these lot have had to put up with any of that Kaffufle. Okay I wouldn’t change it for shit but either im a miserable bitchy cow (maybe –lol) or backbones aren’t being made anymore.

Okay let me illustrate this a bit more. One boy who stayed here bought enough clothing to last him his entire trip (so he wouldn have to do any washing)?!! BUT NO BLOODY FLIPFLOPS-?
Another girl prepared herself for the monsoon rains with an umbrella-?
Another climbed Mount Kenya but neglected to bring climbing boots-?
Another girl advised me (after the cockroach on my breast incident) that I should chill out and try and put my mind on something else and that way I would sleep better. This is the same girl who wouldn’t drink after 6 so she wouldn’t have to use the toilet in the dark cause of the cockroaches. Luckily, this time away has mellowed me somewhat and I guess being at times surrounded by people who don’t have clue about the real world has taught me how to deal with people who don’t have clue about the real world and so I replied to this girls foolish remark, ‘yeah your right’ but in my head I was thinking; ‘er your a moron cos if this happen to you, you would be on the hotline to daddy asking him to book you on the next flight home’. And annoyingly the next morning she told me that she wouldn have known what to do if it had happened to her. ARGH!

Ok enough of the bitching, Just wanted to end this blog with a case I forget to mention last week. Last week at Dophil Clinic I was presented with a women who complained of headaches and absent periods. Nothing else to note just those two symptoms. We did serial pregnancy test and they came back positive. This women claimed that she hadn’t had a period since march and had her last child last year and wasn’t breast feeding. She had no symptoms of pregnancy and her abdomen was completely flat. She wasn’t on any contraception either. So i examined her abdomen, flat she was not 5 months pregnant. I examined her vaginally, and found a massive lump with could have been on her left ovary.
So here we had a ‘pregnant’ women with an empty womb, no symptoms of pregnancy and a mass that could be felt vaginally. Me being the over excited daft medical student suggested that the pregnancy was growing in her abdomen outside her womb (i had read this in a paper i donno when but this being Africa I like to think that anything is possible. Er yeah I was wrong about that. So I suggested that she had a tumour that was producing the pregnancy hormone. Er, again never heard of this in my life but heyho. Woop I was right, the lady came back later that afternoon, post abdominal ultrasound confirming the presence of a mass on her left Ovary. Not so good for her as she will have to have it removed and to be honest I don’t think she truly understood the magnitude of it all but im sure Dr Phill would have counselled her. These tumours are so so rare, can be bothered to get my book and have a look at the stats but i remember reading that a pregnancy hormone producing brain or ovarian cancer is soo soo rare and I guessed one here in Kenya. Okay so that story isn’t that interesting but I need to give myself these small big ups every now and then.

So tomo, back at the hospital. You just never know what ya gonna be presented with. I hope not a birthing mother, please god no. I cant deal with the smell of birth fluid anymore. Anything but birth fluid. Ergh.