I had a friend in my liver.

So if you've looked at my Facebook, you might see my announcement that I no longer had malaria. Let me explain.

A few weeks ago I got a skin infection over the weekend and a fever. I talked to the Peace Corps nurse and got permission to visit a hospital in Dodoma on Monday to get checked out. (This is new, up until about a week before that all PCVs had to go to Dar for treatment, but she had looked at this hospital and decided that it was acceptable.) Sunday night, my hands hurt and I didn't know why. When I woke up Monday morning to walk to the bus, my everything hurt, every joint in my body. (Think back, neck, hands: all jointy.) It was a hard walk, and I forgot to bring my wallet so I had to borrow money to pay the fare when the bus came. Got to town and took a taxi to the hospital. Why would anyone build a hospital so far from town?

I told them about the infection, but then they heard “fever” and “joint pain” and took a blood sample to test for malaria. My parasite count was 6, which they thought was ridiculous; your average Tanzanian doesn't feel a thing until their parasite load in the hundreds. So they admitted me (which is funny, no one in Tanzania gets admitted to the hospital for malaria, they just get the pills and go home to take them). We then learned that my original problem was a boil with a staph infection. I almost hit the year mark without getting sick and decided to go all out I guess.

I stayed there a couple days to take my medicine, another PCV visited to check out the place, bring me some books, and loan me some cash to get back to my village. The staff were nice and I was obviously the only in-patient, so the staff had no problem keeping me company.

How did I get malaria? I have prophylaxis to prevent it, but when my bag was misplaced during the Kigoma trip, so were my malaria pills. Malaria doesn't make you sick right away. The parasite first goes and hides in your liver for a while before it starts pumping out copies of itself, in this case waiting about a month. But I'm fine now, back in the village as usual, and got a lot of sympathy there because people know how malaria messes up wazungu worse than it does them.