I woke up yesterday and for the first time in weeks felt better. I had completely forgotten what that felt like. I started a post right after my first hospital visit but didn’t get around to finishing in time for my next hospital visit. This whole experience went from kind of funny to really annoying to pretty scary and back again.
If there is one event that has happened so far that I regret not having my camera it was during my little visit to the Mombasa Hospital. The photos would have been hilarious. Through all the pain I was in and the tears from that there was a lot laughter about the ridiculousness that was going on.
I went to bed with stomach pain. Not nausea, not gross travelers-illness type symptoms. Just a lot of pain. When I went to bed I thought I had a little heartburn from the platefuls of fried food that had just been consumed so I popped a Pepcid and tried to go to bed. Enter six hours of continued severe pain. Still trying to convince myself it was just a little upset stomach I took some pepto, I drank some water, I walked around a little. Nothing worked. I feel asleep occasionally and would wake up in crazy, wild, delirious fever ridden dreams. By 5am I decided that this just wasn’t normal. This was not heartburn, this was not something to be remedied by some pepto. I went into Katies room and through some sobs woke her up and asked her to go to the hospital with me. I wanted someone there to watch my back with meds and needles and the like. We took a terribly overpriced tuk tuk and checked in, got some grief for not knowing my address here. My professor has been running the program out of this house for 10 years and even she doesn’t know the address. There is no address.
I got triaged right away. Got weighed on a scale that was in kilograms, tried not to do the math in my head (again, fried food left and right here people), had a mercury thermometer stuck under my armpit for the first time since I was about 9 (didn’t even know how to do that math in my head) and got shuffled right into one of the doctor’s offices. Told the man what was going on and what I had taken. They laid me down on a table and he pushed on my stomach. Through some tears told him, yup that’s where it hurts.
They wanted to start an IV and take some blood. Katie had my back through the whole thing. But we both missed the fact that when the doctor come over to start my IV (because there is no way the bumbling nurse could have done it) he wasn’t wearing any gloves. At least the needle was new. There was a cap on the IV that they didn’t screw on tightly enough. When it started gushing blood the nurse came over and yelled at me for messing it up. Great. This is where it all gets a little fuzzy for me. They pushed some pain meds so I was a little groggy the rest of the visit. But not groggy enough
Let me tell you, there is no way to tell who is who at this hospital. Everyone, from doctors to nurses to the person cleaning out the bathroom wears the same style and length white coat. People kept popping in and out of the room, looking at me and walking out. All I really know is I never saw the doctor again. They told me they were running blood tests. I was getting moved from room to room every half hour or so. Someone would come up to me and point down the hallway and tell us to go there. Sure make the girl hopped up on pain meds and still writing in pain walk down the hallway a bunch of times. After repeated inquiries into the results of my blood tests I was finally told they were ready and for me to go sit in the waiting room.
Another half hour later I was ushered into the same doctors office I started in, but this time with another doctor. (I’m making that assumtion here but really it could have been anyone.) She looked at me and said, “So, you’re feeling better.” Um, no, actually I feel exactly the same. I most certainly do not feel better and if anyone would have checked in on me instead of just shuffling me around you might know that. She told me my bloodwork (which was scribbled on a notepad in front of her) showed a bacterial infection. Sure enough that is exactly what the bloodwork said, but I could not figure out how this bacterial infection was manifesting and severe pain and not some of the other symptoms one might associate with a stomach bug. When I told them I wanted a copy of the lab results she looked at me like I was insane and said she’d have to have someone type them up and that might take a while. Heaven forbid lab results get typed up. You just handed me a typed up receipt for this hospital bill, I know there are computers in this place somewhere. I can wait. While I was waiting they pushed some more pain meds, told me they might make me a little dizzy, and then told me to walk down the hallway to wait. Awesome.
I made it home with a bunch of meds that I had to google because I’d never heard of and I spent the next few days in slightly less pain than I had been in, then spent a few days actually feeling pretty good, then started to feel terrible again. Within a week of the first hospital trip I was getting talked back into going again. I was insistent on not going back to the first place so my Kenyan professor took me to the other private hospital so he could do the talking to move things along.
Again, got triaged right away and was seen by a doctor not too long after that. I brought along my blood work from the week before and they repeated the same tests. I was then put back out into the waiting room. At first this system of getting shuffled around and put back out in a waiting room seemed terribly inefficient to me but then I started to realize that it makes a sense. I’m not so sick that I need to be in a hospital bed hooked up to anything. I’m going to feel just as terrible whether I am sitting in a bed or sitting in the waiting room so they may as well free up that bed for someone else to use.
When the results came back I was saw that they were even worse than the first week indicating that the antibiotics they put me on initially were not the right ones. She was going to put me on something more broad spectrum and hope that that cleared it up. It was a lot of waiting around there but I felt well taken of and had some hope when I left that I would start to feel better soon.
Within a few days of that I did start to feel a little better and then I crashed again. I started to feel really groggy and exhausted and achy. I went to bed early one night and woke up from crazy-delirious dreams, drenched in sweat and shaking with a 102.5 degree fever. Thought I was going to die. Called my mother. She told me I wasn’t going to die. It’s funny how much of a baby I turn into when I’m sick. I love infectious diseases. I’m fascinated by the body’s reaction to disease. But when something is ravaging my own body I’m terrified. The next day my fever was gone but I felt exhausted. Two more nights of waking up with fevers and just feeling generally terrible. Every bit of knowledge I had about infectious diseases was screaming at me tell me I had malaria but I was sure the doctors at both hospital visits said I didn’t. But the stomach pain had subsided and these were entirely new symptoms. I went back to my lab results and turns out they didn’t run a malaria test the second time I went to the hospital. Idiots. So I decided that since most of the malaria here is P. falciparum, and that is treated with the same meds I was using to try to prevent it, I would just treat myself. Sure enough, 48 hours after I started treatment, I felt 100% better. Now I can’t say for sure because I refused to set foot in another hospital for all of this but I’m pretty darn sure I was right about that.
I do hope this is it for illnesses for me for the remainder of this trip. I don’t know that I have the energy for all of that again and I’ve been missing my workouts too much lately. Back to running again tomorrow!
