Memoir of an intern doctor…..day 48

My colleague and friend (fellow intern doctor) has been having evening fevers, chills, general body weakness for the past 2 weeks. Strikingly, the evening fever patterns. She tested negative for all possible illnesses we could think of , but they were negative. We blamed it on fatigue. Her supervisor gave her a day off work, but her symptoms were just worse the day after she returned to work.

she started wondering if she were in the sero-conversion stage of HIV. Wondering if she had got an unnoticed prick. I forgot to mention, she was coughing too. A physician advised her to do a chest xray. she had Hilar lymphadenopathy. We did ESR, it was raised too. All our heads went to TB. We got scared. She didn’t tell her mother about it. Just us knew and were just hopeful. She started on meds empirically.

2 days on the meds , she got rigors. Her supervisor granted her 3 days off . but she wasn’t improving.

This friend of mine has never suffered from malaria all her life. And had been taking fansidar prophylaxis for years. The thought of ever getting malaria has always scared her, very worried it would send her to ICU. But here we were praying and hoping 6 days later that it would actually be malaria. When we did a blood smear early into her symptoms, it was negative for malaria.

Yesterday, we did another. Guys, we were praying for severe malaria. Yes . severe malaria over Tuberculosis. We walked her to the lab, a sample was picked and just like we prayed, it turned out to be malaria. 3 artesunate doses and all the symptoms are no more. And she’s not in ICU 😊😂.

We are throwing a positive malaria test/Thank God its not TB party this weekend😂😂😂. Carry your own drinks, we’ll carry the bride and ourselves.