Fever on a hot day

I never thought of a fan as a weapon against deadly diseases. But lying in a bed at night in the tropics, 8 degrees south of the equator, in the monsoon it definitely has the power to save your life. With a fan that is set to sweep across the bed very 5-10 seconds this mechanical miracle is what keeps the mosquitoes away which transmit malaria, dengue, Japanese B encephalitis and chikungunya fever, to name a few of the most prominent here in Timor. You can hear the familiar buzzzz in the room at a distance staying out of the blast of air from the fan. There are many people coming down with the type of malaria that causes 90% of the deaths from the disease, Plasmodium falciparum malaria and the just inconvenient dengue fever that lays you up for about 2 weeks, the local translation of the word for it is ‘break bone fever’. It is now at the end of the rainy season but still very hot so the fact that the fan keeps you a bit cooler is an added plus. The thatch roofed home that I have been in for the past week is beautiful and very functional but is also open to the outdoors entirely. It was sort of an academic insight about the fan until I began to feel hot two days ago. Yip 103. Then the headache… I worried about dengue… then malaria. But a paradoxically reassuring grumbling deep in my stomach let me know I had less to dread. Every thing inside me quickly flowing out, in both directions. Then came day, a daze that passed for a day in my life when everything was a fog. I have not spent 36 continuous hours in bed, ever. Being dehydrated you don't even need to get up to pee, and as I said my innards were cleaner than the preparation one gets for a colonoscopy. The nothing in… nothing out equation works for a while until you start to feel light headed and drift into delirium.

Sierra and Sean once again came to my rescue. The day before I had hitch hiked the 5 kilometers into town with a flat bike tire on the back of a dump truck but today I needed curbside service. They picked me up and deposited me in their spare bedroom. I am generally not a fan of air conditioning but when you are hotter than the temperature outside in the tropics it feels really great to turn the AC down to 23 degrees centigrade and get cozy under a single sheet. The other advantage of AC is you can keep the windows and door closed and you can swat the few mosquitoes that make it through when the door opens to get into the room.

My blood was drawn at the local clinic, the guy was really good, there was almost no fluid left in my body and he still managed to get 3 cc’s out of me in one stick. The tests for Malaria, Dengue and a CBC were off and would be back in a few hours. Never take chances with fever in malarias regions. One of Sierra’s staff came by and picked me up at the laboratory and deposited me back at her house, retuning to the womb of the air conditioned room. I knew I was getting better when Sierra came in the next day and thought the room was too cold and I actually felt not hot for the first time. The day before no matter how cold the AC went I felt like I was in the Saudi desert.

When you are sick sometimes you do not think very clearly, I was sick, very sick. I went to the pharmacy and got doxycycline and started myself on it! Great idea for the prevention of malaria, not a great idea to treat it and a really bad idea for treating diarrhea. It was the next day when my brain came back to functioning a bit that I though……hum…… what about a drug that kills gut bugs maybe? A single dose and I was out the door to Hotel Timor for tea. I have not eaten for two days except for a bowl of soup at lunch today. Perhaps tomorrow I will feel like eating again. For now I am back at the picturesque bungalow… with the fan pacing back and forth keeping the fully loaded mosquitoes at bay.