Health tips

One day after work I text Hayley and Jane to ask if they’d like to come to the cinema night at the pizzeria, they’ll be showing Fellini’s “Amarcord”. No reply from Hayley, but Jane soon texts back, “Nope, Hayley has been taken ill and is in hospital. She has malaria, typhoid and salmonella”. Wow. I saw her only three days ago and she seemed fine. I tell Amy and we decide to go and visit straight away. When you get ill in Tanzania, you rely entirely on your friends and family to feed you because the hospitals don’t serve meals. We buy a box of imported cornflakes and make our way to DCMC, a new and privately run clinic, very clean and peaceful. We find she is the only patient there at the moment and she is so pleased to have company. She tells us she’s had the malaria symptoms on and off for the past couple of weeks and that it’s common to have a sequel after you’ve already had it once. I learn that the severity of malaria depends on the number of parasites in your bloodstream and that you can get typhoid even when you’ve taken the vaccine. A nurse enters in a pristine white uniform, to check on Hayley’s drip. I notice she has a red badge that says, ‘The blood of Christ covers me’. I try to avoid interpreting this graphically. We stay for a while and chat about all sorts of things. If any doctor has tried to hit on Hayley (as has happened to Amy before); how female genital mutilation is still a common practice among the Gogo tribe; how annoying it is to go to the immigration office to apply for the residence permit and have the cocky officers repeatedly ask if they can come and visit you at home... and so on for two hours.

That night I start measuring the time I have left in Tanzania by the number of capsules I am yet to ingest. I fetch the suitcase under my bed looking for the hidden treasures from my far away land. In a small clear plastic bag, only the ears from my chocolate bunny are left. I savour them with a cup of mint tea. Bliss. I notice the box containing my year’s supply of doxycycline. Will my liver be able to handle antibiotics for this long? There are two schools of thought with regards to antimalarials among foreigners here. One is that you should take every precaution you possibly can; it’s not worth getting ill if you can prevent it. The other is a more curative attitude, that you’re bound to get sick anyway so why deteriorate your liver as well? After all the devilish parasites can still fester in your blood regardless of what you take and in any case the cure is to take a double dose of antimalarial drugs. Given it is dry season at the moment and mosquitoes are hibernating, it may well be sensible to give the antibiotics a rest. When they come out to play later in the year, however, it’ll be a different case altogether.