We have been here just over a week now, and we are already experiencing something new to us. Raegan woke up with shaking chills in the middle of the night; then this morning had fever, was feeling cold and nauseous, and tired and achey. I looked on the computer and it said that malaria can show symptoms as early as 7 days after the mosquito bite. We knew that Raegan had gotten a few bites last week, and a few of them caused a painful, stingy sensation she had never felt before. Of course, I have no reason to believe that those weird feelings were due to any specific reason, but they were unusual none the less.
So, we called Tal, the manager of New Hope, and he said to take her to the clinic as soon as it opened at 8am. Admittedly, we are even more blessed to be at New Hope because they have a clinic on site. So, after breakfast I took Raegan to the clinic. We did find out something that new. Because we are taking Mefloquine, a medication to prevent malaria, the disease will not show up on the malaria test available at the clinic. It seems that we don't know exactly why it doesn't show up but through experience they have learned that the negative result us not accurate when an anti-malarial is being taken. We did know that it is still possible to get malaria while taking anti-malarials but that it usually makes for a milder case.
Because of this fact, they determined not to give Raegan the test for malaria. Rather, based on her symptoms and the time-frame, the recommendation from the clinician was that Raegan begin a 3 day treatment for the disease. She will take 4 pills at a time, twice a day for 3 days. The pills are best absorbed with fat, so we were told to try to give her milk or fried food (just a little interesting info for you). :) I asked the clinician if we may be over-reacting or should give some time to see if she just has some other bug but she did not think so. She said that we needed to give treatment now because with malaria, the sooner it is treated the better and all of the symptoms fit.
So, for those of you westerners who may be unaware, let me give you a little info to help you see that it is no cause for panic. There are 4 strands of malaria, one of which is severe. There are several reasons that Raegan's symptoms do not point to the severe strand; one of which being that it has shown symptoms so quickly. The more severe usually takes longer, up to several months, to show and has symptoms like jaundice and hypoglycemia. Raegan doesn't have any of those. So, we'll keep you updated. For now, it is similar to having the flu.
Troy and Tyler are at school, as well as Kim, and Floyd is at the office. For today, I will stay at the house with Raegan in case her symptoms change or she needs anything. It is about 9:40am (1:40am Central time) now and she has been a sleep since we returned from the clinic.
On a side note, we still don't have power, so we can't pump water. The boys experienced their first chance to takea a Jerry can to the nearby water source. Later we will try to share video of them trying so hard to carry the larger jug back to the house. For the record, I did go once myself before they even got out of bed. ;)
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