by So I got malaria during my mission in Cameroon, but the funny thing is I had it cured in the US. How did this happen you might ask? It’s a crazy story. It all started with a little thing called the COVID pandemic. In March 2020, the Church shutdown all the missions in Africa and had all the missionaries serving to return to their homes. You can read about my hectic experience leaving Cameroon during COVID here. When we left Africa in haste, they neglected to give us anti-malarial pills that we took daily to prevent malaria. I got home and started a two week quarantine without taking any pills.
Pre-Diagnose
I think I got bit by a mosquito while we were sleeping outside of the airport the night before we left for the US. Malaria has a two week incubation so you don’t feel the symptoms until after two weeks. At the end of my two week quarantine, the malarial symptoms starting kicking in. I started feeling really tired. I helped my dad with renovating a new house and I would work a little and then get really tired and have to sit down to catch my breath.
The third week after I got home I got a new malaria symptom called the the chills, where you feel super cold and shiver even if it’s hot. I started laying on the couch with piles of blankets on me and would tell my family, “I thought it was warmer in California. I wish I was back in Cameroon, where it was warmer.” I walked around in a jogging suit because I was so cold. I would wrap myself in blankets but couldn’t get warmer. I couldn’t sleep at night and would just watch YouTube videos.
Despite all this I started working a grocery store. On the second day that I worked there, I was so nauseated that I couldn’t stand. I had to go home. On the way home, I threw up. We immediately went to the hospital. I left in my full jogging suit because I was so cold and turned the car heater to full blast even though it was 80 degrees outside.
We thought I had COVID so I got a drive thru Corona virus test outside the hospital where they shove a thin plastic stick deep into your nose. I was so numbed to pain that it didn’t hurt but I wouldn’t want it again.
After that we parked and I started walking to the hospital. I threw up on the ground again. I could hardly walk. I stood in line and was shaking and trembling. Mind you this was during the peak of the Corona Virus season in late April. Everyone was staring at me as I was coughing and shivering. It felt like a zombie movie where I am the first person to get the zombie virus because I looked like I was totally falling apart. I was brought to a room and waited for an hour for a doctor to come and treat me. I was freezing and shivering and starving and felt like I was going to die.
A doctor came in and asked me questions. I told her that I think that might have gotten COVID from working in the grocery store. She told me that I most likely had COVID. They took some blood samples. The nurse who took my blood had to poke me three times because she couldn’t find a vein to take blood from. They then told me to walk to the other side of the hospital to get an X-ray. So I walked, shaking and on the verge of collapsing, to the X-ray. I had to stand still to take the X-ray but I was shaking too much. Next thing I knew, I passed out and was on the ground as a group of nurses were in a frenzy trying to get me up. They put a new face mask on me and put me in a wheel chair and brought me back to a room. I got an IV which is like a sac of fluid that is put into your body through a need. They gave me two IVs and I felt a lot better and they let me go home thinking I only had COVID.
Diagnosis
The next day, we got a call from the hospital telling us that I tested negative for COVID. We were relieved. They then told us that I actually had malaria. I went into the hospital again and they had me give 4 more blood samples. The nurses weren’t really good at drawing blood so they just poked my arm a ton and it was excruciating. Terribly excruciating. I got another IV and felt a little better. I actually liked the IVs, they hydrate your body really well and it’s as if you’re getting dunked in water but inside of your body. It felt cool every time.
The funny thing about getting malaria in the US is that the doctors don’t know how to cure it. None of the doctors I met with initially had any training with malaria. That’s why you are better off getting malaria in Africa because the Africans know exactly what malaria looks like and how to treat it. A few days later, I went to the hospital to give more blood samples and returned home. For some reason they didn’t deem malaria a dangerous enough virus to have me stay in the hospital. They had me stay home and didn’t give me any medicine to take to fight the virus which was actively destroying my liver and blood cells. That night I was in bed and had trouble breathing so my mom drove me to the ER at 1 am and they had me give 4 more blood samples and gave me another IV. The only thing they knew what to do was take blood samples and give me IVs. The next morning, just a few hours later, I had to go to the hospital AGAIN to give even more blood samples but they wouldn’t let me in the hospital because I had a fever of 101 degrees so they had me stay outside.
I was waiting outside for about an hour then I threw up and then they brought out a wheel chair to bring me to the ER for the second time in just a few hours. By this point, I was pretty popular in the ER. They were like, “hey, you were here last night”. I gave four more blood samples so in total, I gave 12 blood samples in 24 hours which is 12 whole vials of blood. That day they found out that I also had salmonella in my blood stream. Then finally I met with the only infectious disease doctor who knows how to treat malaria in Orange County and she proscribed me malaria and salmonella medication. As soon as I took the medicine I started feeling better. The malaria medication was helping eliminate the nausea and the trouble breathing and the chills except that the salmonella medication made me dizzy and I felt like a drunk person when I would walk around.
The malaria symptoms completely went away after about 2 days of taking the medication. About a week after taking the medicine they told me that there was no more malaria or salmonella in my blood stream.
A crazy thing about my malaria experience is that I wasn’t the only person in my missionary group to get it. Two other missionaries who returned home with me from Cameroon also got malaria, one from Canada and another from France. I talked with the missionary who had malaria in France and he said the doctors were convinced he had COVID and they didn’t even give him and medication.
In closing, getting malaria was one of the worst things that I have ever gone through in my life. In the moment I felt like I was going to die not being able to eat for days, throwing up multiple times a day, having a constant headache, feeling cold all day, weakness, and having to give endless blood samples. Beginning to end I suffered these symptoms for about 4 weeks. There are no long-term affects of malaria and I feel perfectly fine now. To all missionaries in Africa, please take your malaria pills.
