OR WHY MALARIA IS SCARY, POSITIVE OR NEGATIVEI think I have malaria. (Well, I thought I had malaria in early March, a few weeks after returning from malarial India.) I keep getting sick. I just had a cold, and three days after getting over it, I get a fever. Malarial symptoms are all symptoms of the common cold. And you get sick in waves – first feverish or chilly, then healthy for two or three days, then feverish or chilly again. This just keeps happening until you 1. get treated, 2. your body completely annihilates the parasite or 3. you die.
I didn’t take malaria medication while traveling. In my defense, taking malaria medication – while perfectly safe if taken for a few weeks – can make you sicker than just getting malaria. Two months is too long to be on it.
I promise I wore mosquito repellent. But the mosquitoes in Madurai (in Tamil Nadu, India) got me bad. They are the most aggressive mosquitoes I have ever had a run-in with. I covered my arms, legs, and midsection with industrial-hazard-level deet bug spray. So they bit my face. And in-between my fingers. I started putting mosquito repellent on my hands, but every time I used the bathroom, the repellent would wash off. And soon thereafter I would get a fresh bite on my hands again. It was a losing battle. By the time I left Madurai, I looked like a chicken pox victim. It was terrible.
So you can understand why, when I magically picked up cold symptoms two weeks after leaving Madurai, I was worried. You’d be worried too.
Unfortunately, northern China is not a malarial zone. No one knows how to diagnosis it. Most clinics don’t have tests for it. If you have malaria (or any tropical disease), it can be much safer to stay in the malarial (tropical) area to get treated. Doctors know the symptoms, and can quickly get you tested and medicated. Even in my non-malarial hometown of Kensington, MD (a suburb of Washington, DC), you would have a hard time finding a malaria test.
So, in a way, I was screwed.
I do, however, have lovely bosses who treasure their relationship with Shansi and Oberlin greatly. They would not, could not, let one of their Oberlin Shansi teachers get sick. So they listened to my pleas about getting a blood test, though I think they thought I was crazy for being so anxious and stubborn about the whole thing.
People from the Foreign Affairs Office (FAO) took me to Taigu’s hospital. “They don’t have the test here,” they explained “but the doctor will take a look and can tell if you’re positive.” I was fuming. Malaria has all the symptoms of a cold. How in the world could a doctor tell if I had it? Just as I suspected, the doctor thought I was crazy for thinking I had malaria. His nurse took my temperature, which was normal. He listened to my heart. “You don’t have malaria. You just have a cold. I’ve seen malaria patients. I would know,” the man from the FAO translated for me. Really? Can you tell just by looking at me? I wondered all this and more to myself. On the way out, they people from the FAO handed me three different medications, told me that I must take them, and only vaguely told me what they were for. Alexandra finally translated them for me. One was an antibiotic (obviously, I didn’t take this), one was to cure sore throats and was a mix of western and eastern medication (took this), and the last one she couldn’t translate (I didn’t take this one either).
Upon my insistence, and my insistence alone, the next day we went to the province capital hospital (Taiyuan People’s Hospital). At this point, I was so worried that I was prepared to take an overnight train to Beijing to get tested at some expensive ex-patriot clinic. But luckily, Taiyuan had what we were looking for. After meeting with another doctor, who once again told me I had a cold yet wrote a script for the test anyway, and wandering through many hallways of the hospital, we found the testing room. It was just a laboratory. I wondered if the equipment would be properly sterilized. I wondered if I’d get sicker by visiting all these hospital than by just staying in bed, dealing with my malaria/cold. “Can I prick your ear?” the man from FAO translated. What?!? Prick my ear? The ungloved lab technician had started coming at my face with a sharp bit of metal (that seemed to have come from a new plastic pointy-bits-of-metal packet and was hopefully sterilized). Like any normal American, I freaked out. “What is he doing!?!?!” I say to my translator. “He needs to get blood. He could poke your finger, but it would hurt more,” he said. After explaining how – trying to regain some face – “we” don’t prick ears for blood in America, I went with the ear prick anyway. I now know how babies feel when they get their first shots. If someone wants to prick my finger or poke my arm, I just relax. But when someone pricks the bottom of my earlobe, it feels strange, unnatural, and a bit sadistic. You want to do WHAT…WHERE?!?! My ears are pierced; it’s not like I haven’t had pointy things near them. But this new medical experience felt so wrong, was so culturally different that I was tense the whole time. (By the way, both the lab technician and the translator think Americans are crazy for not using the painless earlobe method in American blood work.)
Did I mention it was the scariest experience I have had in a long time?
Guess what? I’m negative. Isn’t that great? We don’t have sick leave here in Taigu, so even though I was in and out of hospitals for 2 days, I had to make up all four of the classes I missed. (I made them up over the weekend.) And did not have time to stay in bed getting better from my cold. It was a frustrating few days to say the least.
This story, I’m sure, illustrates some interesting cultural points about China and America, the East and the West, but I have yet to figure out what those enlightening points are. All I know is that getting sick abroad is terrifying, and something everyone should avoid at all costs. But perhaps, we can learn the most from our new environments when we are the most stressed, the most vulnerable, and the most in need of friends, family, and a community.
The translator and I have become good friends. And now I know where the nearest malaria test is. Splendid.
The Map of Malarial Areas is from http://www.smeds.org/7th%20Malaria/Peterson/default.html.
