So it finally happened... all my grand illusions of being completely immune from the nasty malaria and being a super strong warrior that can come to Africa and survive without keeling over with any of the crazy illnesses that plague the poorest regions here, were completely wiped out in one fail swoop within the space of half an hour on Wednesday morning!

It happened like a complete bolt out of the blue...one minute I was absolutely fine, bouncing about being my usual self, the next I was quite literally on the floor (!). A few hours earlier I had been happy as can be, out for a 6 mile run under the beautiful early morning sunrise, morning devotion as usual at the office, then out on a fantastic long moto ride to one of the poorest border communities, Agatuse on the border with Burkina Faso, enjoying the absolutely stunning views along the way and having fun with the locals we met on our arrival (well basically they were having fun laughing at me trying to piece together the little Kusaal and French I know in order to attempt some kind of conversation with them!). I have to admit that on the way back I did start to feel a little strange, I kept burping and yawning (haha bizarre), which was a little bit odd (!)...but to be honest I just thought I was just getting a little bit travel sick after all the whizzing along the windy sandy bumpy roads and dried up rivers that we'd ridden down to get there!

Literally half an hour after we got back to the office, my body went into weird-mode, and somehow in auto pilot it got me on my moto and rode me back to the house where I left it in a heap in the hurry to get inside and fall flat onto my bed. I knew something was wrong as the only other time I have needed so desperately to lie down was when I had been dazed by the mid-day 45 degree heat, but then I'd be aiming for the cool tiled floors for reason, where as in this case I had no choice!

It's scary how fast it can happen, and to be honest I was really lucky to have been here long enough (and had enough friends who have had it) to know that at the first signs of weirdness I should call for help. So, after attempting to move from the bed to the nearest sink and ending up in a quivering wreck on the floor, I laid there with my head over a bucket, called my wonderful friend, adoptive mother and housemate Janice, and literally just panted down the phone. If she hadn't have known it was me I'm sure she would have thought someone was giving her dodgy phonecalls! Luckily as soon as she heard me she knew exactly what was wrong, told the bunch of Head Teachers that she was in the middle of training 'I've got to go, Malaria!', and dashed to the house on her bicycle. Gold medal for here for the time she made it in, it's a good job the police don't stop people on bicycles for speeding around here!

And so it was pretty much downhill from there. My fever crept up, my stomach lurched and twisted in pain, and my head just span. I will be ever grateful to Janice for holding my hand and being ever so calm as I deteriorated into a blubbering mess, and to my colleague Abigail who after a quick call for hep came round with the World Vision pickup truck just in time to hold my hair back as I projectile vomited for about the fifth time all over the place. Ok, you get the picture :-/ not a pretty sight!

It was my first experience of going to the local clinic here, and was so happy to see friendly faces that I know sitting and smiling at me, welcoming me with happy 'you are welcome's!' at the front desk - typical Zebilla! A huge perk of being such a part of the bustling community here is that I seem to always know someone wherever I go, and when that place I'm going to is hospital it comes in very very handy! So the girl I used to buy tea-bread from in the market (yes Bev, Fouzia has a job!) has now got a job in the local clinic, and her father happens to be the lab technician. So luckily I was in very good hands indeed. The clinic is a little shack of a place, corrugated tin roof, wooden stilts holding the whole thing up, a couple of stone-built rooms, and a heap of benches outside where us sickly people lay down and groaned whilst everyone else watched the lunchtime news on TV. I was so well looked after as they registered me, checked me over, weighed me, took my blood pressure and bounced me in and out and in and out of the doctors room and the lab test room testing for this and that and the other. The malaria test actually came back negative, which happens a lot, but causes a lot of confusion. I had to carefully explain this to them, that we often test negative even when we have it, but I think the lab man was a bit offended that I was accusing his tests of being inaccurate! Luckily we were able to slowly persuade the doctor that most likely it was still malaria...but it still meant having to be tested for everything else under the sun as well...typhoid, cholera, dysentery...the list went on, and time too!

By this point I was becoming seriously dehydrated, and the doctor was sitting there dithering over what to do with me, I wasn't well enough to urge him on, and it took a lot of strength for me to be patient with him whilst he figured things out... "well, Emma, what's your diagnosis, what do you think?" ("WHY are you asking me..I am not a doctor!!!!") I actually couldn't help laughing at him at this point, what a random situation to be in. Luckily a nurse that I know from the district hospital (where we had chosen not to go because it would have been too busy and overwhelming for me in that state) walked in at that point, took one look at me and said in a bit of a panic (which was really helpful for my anxiety level) "get her to a hospital, she needs to be hooked up to a drip! NOW!!", Thank you (!), finally someone with some sense. Phew.

So a couple of phone calls later and I was being whisked to Bolga by Dominic the driver in the World Vision vehicle, the most horrendous one hour journey over literally hundreds of potholes and massive gaping holes in the road. Dominic drove like a pro, and got us there faster than I could have asked for; he says he used to work for some white people, I think he used to work for MI5!

The regional hospital in Bolga is huge, and was absolutely packed! I was really blessed to have Helen (Bolga friend and volunteer) there waiting for me, super prepared and organised having been through this so many times before. She got me zipped through the whole weighing, naming "Emma? - are you sure she is a girl?!!!" (Emma here is used as a short version of Emmanuel very confusing when they meet me!), blood pressure checking and pulse counting (which at this point must have been either super fast because of the stress of the whole thing, or super slow because I was so close to passing out, I can't really remember I was so dazed). There were people sitting everywhere and of course the three white people accompanied by a World Vision member of staff, did attract a heck of a lot of attention. One of the embarrassing things about being a white person here is that you do get treated differently, and so I was quickly ushered (in my newly acquired wheelchair!) past the hundreds of poorly souls who'd probably been waiting for hours, and straight into the doctors room where the door was promptly shut and I was seen in a flash. I was really embarrassed, and felt awful. Especially when some women started kicking off about it and poor Janice had to intervene. Oh dear what a commotion I was causing, luckily I was a tad too sick to really worry about it.

This time the doctor didn't even bother to test me he just scrawled 'severe malaria' in huge letters in my hospital book and added 'and dysentery' as a bit of an afterthought, and I was wheeled the two miles or so (no joke) from his room over to the female ward. It was nice ride and I remember thinking I just wanted the porter to let me go whizzing down the ramps, but I figured I'd better not act daft seeing as I was so sick...

On our arrival, I heard Janice Helen and Dominic arguing something about a VIP room (!). Apparently the doctor had said I could have (and pay for of course) the VIP room, which was a private room with its own bathroom and toilet. Great! However, the reality was that there was no such room available (surprise) and I should lump down in one of the usual beds, although by now I simply didn't care. Arriving at the bed we were asked 'where are you sheets?' (what sheets?) and pillow...and bucket (for sickness)...and water... bringing a whole new meaning to self catering! Even the medication we had to send Dominic out for as they didn't have enough in stock. I was slowly but surely getting a true insight into how things really are here, from a patients view. In the meantime, I discovered there was nowhere to bath or wash my hands, and the best surprise of all was that there was no toilet; we simply had to go outside (!!!!). (Or use the bucket, ha).

Eventually I was finally hooked up to a drip, and my wonderful friends arrived with clean bed sheets, a pillow, my bucket (haha) and loads of yummy food (which I could of course only look at but It was still really so sweet of them!). Once the first drip was in, and the next 6 were lined up at the end of my bed, I knew I'd be better soon. My night was peppered with visitors so I didn't really have time to worry about what was going on, and my friends kindly made a curtain of privacy when the nurse approached me with two massive needles and announced they were to go right in my behind, ouch! The nurses were absolutely lovely, and constantly came by to check on me, adjust my drip, check my folder and generally ask a few questions about the 'solomia' (white lady in Fra Fra) about every en minutes! This took my mind off the fact that there were no mosquito nets (although a huge number of patients were inevitably in with malaria), the spiders crawling about the ceiling, and the small army of ants that had begun to attack the feast on my bedside cabinet (!).

It was a weird night, the drips for rehydration brought the feeling back to my numb hands again, the drips for my stomach made me feel slightly giddy, and the quinine that was to treat the malaria made me go deaf and have the weirdest of dreams. I woke up wondering whether some of the visitors I'd had had actually been real or not!

The next day I overheard some nurses in conversations about keeping me in a few more days, but I managed somehow to sweet talk the staff into hurrying up the drips and letting me out of there asap; I simply wanted to get 'home' to Zebilla and rest, the whole experience was just exhausting!

Once back here it took a few days to really recover, I had soooo many visitors, and everyone I knew in Zebilla somehow knew I had been sick, they were all so lovely "how is your condition?" "better!" "wishing you a speedy recovery!!" which took my mind off the sheer boredom and frustration that had set in. Now, two weeks later I'm still feeling a little bit the effects of tiredness but am slowly getting back to normal. I'm just glad I never lost my appetite as I've been working on becoming 'plumpy' as my Ghanaian friends like to call it (!) and I didn't want all the eating of fufu (pounded yam) and fried plantain I've been doing to go to waste!

I'll be ever grateful to everyone who was so kind and helpful, and I'll never dismiss someone having malaria again. It's given me a real insight into what the people here, especially the children, have to deal with on a day to day basis. I just thank my lucky stars that I didn't get it as bad as it could've been, and I wish I could give a few of them to the kids around here too, God only knows they need them!

With love from Ghana,

Em

Xx

...the photo was taken by one of my friends when I was starting to feel a little better...that was after I had been nicknamed the 'Disney princess' for the way I splayed myself on the bed in an 'ah I'm sooo sick!' way with my pink bed sheets wrapped about me and my pink hair wafting about the place...a bit embarrassing but it got the nurses attention anyway! This picture is of one of the really lovely female nurses who came to take my temperature, but couldn't because she was too busy giggling!