Dengue Fever

The first two and a half weeks at site after install went pretty well…meeting potential work partners in the community, getting my room organized, and being shown around the area by my family. Right around the end of the first week of November, Ariana and I decided to make a brief trip up to Kaolack to check for mail and eat some American food. All went smoothly with our first trip away from site, but while I was there I was talking to one of the other volunteers and I mentioned something about how, “Aside from getting a bad cold, I really haven’t been sick at all.” BIG MISTAKE.

Of course after making that stupid comment, irony just had to step in and prove me wrong. Immediately after returning to Nioro that Friday night, I developed a fever and spent the rest of the weekend in bed as it got progressively higher and higher. In addition to the fever, I had a horrible cough and zero appetite; but what really made this brush with strange African diseases fun was the fact that it was accompanied by insomnia. I really don’t know if there’s anything more annoying than feeling like crap and not even being able to sleep through it.

By Monday morning, having not slept more than a few hours in three nights and with my fever now up to almost 103°, I figured it was time to give the medical office a call. After looking through our medical handbook over the weekend, I was rather convinced that I’d forgotten to take my prophylaxis at some point and landed myself with malaria. While the doctor was confident in ruling out malaria (phew!), she did seem to think that it might be Dengue Fever. I’ll leave you all to wikipedia it and figure out exactly what Dengue is (because I couldn’t explain it well enough anyway), but suffice it to say its not something to mess around with. So I was told to pack up and head back to Kaolack to get some rest and because it’d be easier for PC to come get me there if the need arose. (Yeah, at this point I was starting to get a little freaked out.)

[Side note: why didn’t the doctor think I could just get some rest at site? Well, let’s just say, that, as much as I love my family, they are Senegalese and so not particularly inclined to leave me alone when I say I’m not feeling well. They were certainly concerned and tried to be helpful. However, they also didn’t really understand why I couldn’t eat huge helpings of rice. And they kept insisting that my 103° fever was simply my body adjusting to the climate. Right, I’m sure that was the problem.]

Anyway, after one night in our over crowded regional house not sleeping due to a combo of insomnia and getting locked out of the room with the fever-reducing medicines, I felt like I was about to LOSE IT. I really do try my best to keep a positive outlook here, but I will challenge anyone to be able to do that after running a fever for 4 straight days on no sleep. So I called up Dr. Ararat again and, given that the fever still wasn’t going away, I headed up to Dakar to stay in the med hut.

By the time I got to Dakar on Tuesday afternoon (thankfully without incident) I was so out of it that it took me an hour of wandering around the Peace Corps office in a daze before it dawned on me that I should go see the doctor. What can I say? My brain was totally fried. Anyway, to make a long story short…she ran some blood tests and I spent the rest of the week in the med hut popping Tylenol to keep the fever down. On the plus side, the med hut is air-conditioned and there’s WiFi and a phone on which you can make free phone calls to America. Plus, it is gloriously quiet and I was finally able to get some sleep and therefore regain my ability to think coherently. On the down side, my fever ended up lasting over a week. I did finally kick the fever though and headed back to Nioro. There was no definitive conclusion from Dr. Ararat as to what I contracted, but I certainly hope I never get it again!

So there you have it, the story of my first major brush with disease in Africa. I figured I’d write a post about it not in an effort to worry anyone back home, but simply because getting sick is a part of our life here. My immune system is in no way used to the living conditions/climate nor the general lack of stellar hygiene that is the norm around here. Any volunteer who actually makes it through two years in Senegal without having some strange virus, skin infection, intestinal problem, etc. is probably just really freaking lucky. That being said, now that I’ve had my go with it, I very much hope to avoid getting sick again.

[Of course I write this having just recovered from another week spent in and out of bed with some strange flu-like virus, so no such luck. Sigh. Oh Africa…]