Market and Eggs and Malaria … Oh My!

In the past few years, many of the researchers that have worked at BFMS for more than a few months at a time have gotten malaria at some point during their stay, despite taking antimalarial medication. Local people here seem to have malaria often – I think it’s like their equivalent of our seasonal flu or cold, except when one has malaria your whole body is in excruciating pain, your guts feel like they are being ripped out of your body, your joints are inflamed and achy so that you can’t move, and the idea of death starts seeming like a sweet finale… or so I’ve heard from people who have had malaria in the past.

You may be wondering from the title of this blog post what malaria sickness has anything to do with eggs or market day (the jolliest time of the week). I’ll get straight to the point and fill in the details after. Katie, the best research assistant in the world, got sick with malaria. Her symptoms (all of those wonderful things I mentioned above) manifested themselves in the tro-tro, on our way back from market last Tuesday. As I write this post and as I search for the words to describe the events that occurred just a few days ago, I am baffled by the ridiculousness of the whole scenario. As usual, the actual shopping part of the market was stuffy, smelly and hot. Katie and I did our groceries for the week, we ate some baked yam from a lady selling them on the side of the road (eating street food can be ‘sketchy’ but baked yams are usually ok), we used the internet for a few hours, and then got on a tro-tro heading back to the villages of Boabeng and Fiema. A few minutes into the incredibly bumpy ride, in the tro-tro packed with way too many sweaty people, a few of the eggs I was carrying in my shopping bag broke and made a giant mess, dripping on people’s legs and clothing the entire way home. A lady in front of me started shouting in twii, telling me I have to wash her skirt. As I was frantically apologizing for my mess and reassuring her that I would personally wash the tiny spot on which some of the egg juice had stained her skirt, Katie began vomiting in her backpack. She was so quiet about it that I didn’t even notice until a minute or so after she began puking. Assuming Katie was car sick, I immediately began shouting and bickering with the tro-tro driver to slow down and to stop driving like a mad man. “Yes, yes” I told him, “I know there is a soccer game on in a few minutes, but my friend is feeling very sick”! He did not slow down. Katie kept vomiting and laughing in between each hurling bout. Katie did not stop vomiting - although she did stop laughing when she got too exhausted – for several hours.

Aside: This is one of the things Katie and I have in common; we both laugh during 90% of all situations, even during the most inappropriate of times. The way I see it, it’s either laugh or cry and I prefer to seem crazy laughing, than pathetic crying. Let’s just say I did a lot of laughing the rest of this day.

We later tried to figure out how many times she puked in 8 or so hours and we counted between 16 to 20 times! The entire tro-tro ride, Katie puked inside her backpack. Many of our vegetables were covered in partially digested yam, but we cleaned these off and still used them for cooking that week. LOL The entire 15 minute walk, Katie puked every few minutes on the side of the road. For a few hours at the guest house, Katie puked on the ledge of the stone deck by the stairs. Katie vomited so much that she turned green and began sweating to the point where she looked like she had just walked out of a swimming pool. Well, you can imagine that by this point I was pretty worried (yup, I’m a bright one), and I decided to charter the brand new/used BFMS van to rush Katie to the hospital in Nkoranza. When I say rushed, I mean Ghana time rushed. We still waited for the driver to get dressed, come down to the guesthouse, do some random repairs on the “new” van and fill various tubes with water and oil etc. All the while I was laughing like a psycho, which I could tell was making the Ghanaians around me quite uncomfortable, but at least Katie understood.

I considered that maybe the yam she ate was bad but I had 2 pieces and she had 1 and I was fine and dandy. I know I have a well trained and durable Romanian stomach but given her state I thought that I should at least have some indigestion… a bit of gas or something… So my next thought was “maybe Katie has malaria” … and she did!
After waiting several hours in lines full of sick Ghanaian people while Katie continued to vomit her guts out, after Katie being diagnosed with having gastrointestinal malaria, and after arguing with the doctor about not wanting IVs (we are both worried about re-used needles and AIDS, which is fairly prevalent all over Africa) we finally got the medications necessary to treat her strain of malaria. Back at the guesthouse that night, Katie managed to keep down her pills and to get some much needed sleep - for a few hours at least because she vomited a few more times late in the night.

All I can say is that she was very, very brave. What a good sport! Just a few days later she is feeling much better, and she is back in the forest with me, watching monkeys. I am very impressed with Katie. I only hope that I could deal with malaria as well as she did, if ever were I to catch it in the future (knock on wood).