Malaria.

I thought that a lot of the things I would see in these tropical, African, resources poor hospitals would be diseases I had only imagined of in textbooks…but what I’ve come to find is that the things I see aren’t wildly exotic. It’s not like I haven’t seen dramatic things – horrible meningitis, disfiguring car accidents, typhoid fever, babies dying left, right and center (though a lot less die in Axim…). And a lot of what I see are exaggerations of diseases at home – ecclampsia (prenatal care is not the best here), ganglionic cysts that have grown so large people can’t move limbs, advanced cancers of blood and bone and other places….

But the number one disease that I see constantly is malaria. Everyone’s either got it, or had it at some point. Dr. O says he gets malaria up to three times a year. He’s so used to the signs and symptoms that he will just take medication without testing himself when he thinks he has it. He gave us a three-hour lecture on malaria yesterday, and now I feel ready to treat it! Except…that I’ll basically never see it at home. Especially in children, who don’t tend to go to developing countries on their own.

There was a cholera outbreak in a village two hours away from Axim…Dr. O went, and I was really conflicted about going. On the one hand, it would have been interesting to see. I’ve never been in the middle of a cholera outbreak, and I’m not sure when the next opportunity I have to go is. However, they had special boots and scrubs and didn’t have any my size…and you have to take good precautions when walking into a cholera zone. Plus, I’m not the most comfortable with IVs to feel skilled enough to be inserting them in very sick people with very dried up veins (for those who don’t know, cholrea causes a watery diarrhea so severe you get massively dehydrated, lie on a table with a hole cut under your bottom so you can poop constantly…and can die). So I sat this one out.

Maybe next time I’ll go. For now, I’ll master malaria.