Invaders swim

Feb 8th

So, yesterday I had insistent explosive diarrhea in the wee hours of the morning. During Sunday, our day off, I progressively felt weaker, (like fever weakness, but without the spike in body temperature) culminating in a headache. These are all malaria symptoms. They are also flu symptoms. So today, I went to fame, a medical clinic that is a 45 minute drive away in Karatu. The compound itself is in the process of growing, with new buildings in construction. The medical center itself has a vaulted sunlit ceiling and is very clean. Every room had a MacBook, and the staff is very friendly.

The receptionist couldn't understand the way that I tried to pronounce the "L"s in my name, so Birr Bessmer was led down a hallway by a nurse who stops at some room and shrieks, "Eww. That's so gross!" Out of what I guess is an O.R. comes a six foot plus shaved-bald guy in scrubs who asks, "Do I still have blood on me." He had a giant stitched gash on his neck covered by an X of band-aids. Dr. Frank nailed a memorable first impression. He is also smart and funny.

I got a blood test and a stool test. Pooing on command is a bit surreal by the way: the fast lane to hernia city if you ask me.

AND THE VERDICT IS.........

Hookworm. Tiny parasites from the ground that bore into your feet and ankles and then ride to your lungs. From there they climb into gut, and lay eggs in your GI tract where you poop out their fertile little ova...to complete their life cycle. Camp Nairobi, our neighbors, is chock full of hookworm. Unfortunately, I've been spraying worm eggs into toilets that lead to septic tanks rather than into the dirt; so take that, Freeloaders.

So, I gots internal parasites. I am now a part of a selective group of volunteers who all hold up a crooked index finger to show our solidarity. The other symptoms were a secondary infection of what Dr. Frank calls mzungu flu. Probably due to a hookworm induced depressed immune system. Mzungu roughly translates as foreigner, and depending on the verbal inflection of the person saying it, it might be an insult. This word's inflective difference in annunciation is similar to "jew," in that there is a pejorative way to say it.

Having hookworm is like that episode of Futurama, where Fry has internal worms that make him stronger and smarter, except that they make you weaker, irritable, sensitive to sunlight, and have diarrhea. link to reference

Oldeani hookworms are strong too. We need a triple dose of 200mg of albendazole to clear them. Dr. Frank let me see my egg laden poo under a microscope, so Mom, you're finally a Grandma....of about a million.

During our conversation, we naturally drifted to all sorts of parasites, and I got a chance to enlighten Dr. Frank about candiru catfish of South America. In case you didn't know, Candiru are gill parasites of larger fish, which they find by following a urea trail, as fish shed their uric wastes through their gills. If you pee into candiru hometurf waters, the urea trail is very very strong to their sensitive noses and they can't resist to mistakenly swim into your urethra. And being catfish, they have three sharp, pseudo-poison tipped (coated in aggravating bacteria) re-curved spines. They are easy to avoid: don't pee in the water in S. America.

The whole medical adventure costed 12500 Tanzanian Shillings. That's right. 10,000 to shoot the shit with a doctor for 15 minutes, 1,000 to have someone look at my blood and stool, and 1500 to get my de-worming pills. Once again, in USD, that is 8$ for a doctor, $0.80 for the lab tech, and $1.20 for medicine. Cash economies are awesome: Medics can't charge more, or they would be useless as no-one would go.

This whole thing is a bit of an adventure as far as I'm concerned. The medicine is cheap and effective, so it blends into the realm of funny rather than dangerous. It's just a fact of life living in a rural part of Tanzania. I'm a "Hookie" now. I'm lucky enough that it's innocuous and maybe slightly annoying because I'm relatively wealthy compared to the general populous here: I can literally afford to laugh at it. It is really nothing serious. Plus, I got a definitive NO MALARIA from my blood test, which is nice because I got a couple mosquito bites in Arusha. Up here at 6,000 feet of elevation, I have not been bitten once.

I am still getting a ton of exercise playing with these kids. The kids that don't go to school demand airplane spins and climb all over you. The kids that come home from school want to play sports or have you "spot" their gymnastics: read that as "carry their weight as they pretend to walk on their hands."

Badai