Yes we have no malaria
It seems doctors can be as prone to sensationalism as, well, let’s see, auditors. Journalists aren’t that bad. Unless of course they write for rags like the Evening Special, which for some reason BM reads pretty religiously. Ho hum, I wonder what that reason could be… But I’ve gone off on a tangent.
Admittedly I had a pretty high aspirin resistant fever for nearly two days before I agreed to allow myself to be dragged to the emergency room. And yes I was coughing and shivering and had one helluva sore throat. But it was bloody 6.8 degrees out there. I’m used to lows of around fifteen. Anyways the quack looks at me, goes through the brief medical history thing, the pulse check etc and is acting normally until he learns I just got back from an official trip to a gas field in Dadu (which mind you is a desert and definitely not a place where anything other than heat stroke is endemic) and then he starts muttering, “malaria, malaria” nearly giving me a heart attack. Then the dude looks at my throat and says almost disappointedly, “It’s probably not malaria after all” as if I was just wishing that it might be. It turns out its some kind of bacterial infection. So the guy puts me on fexofenadine and levofloxacine for the infection and the usual aspirin for the fever and this ridiculously ineffective cough syrup the name of which has just slipped my mind. AND he puts me on the whole chloroquine phosphate regimen for a week just to be sure that I don’t have malaria AND he tells me I’m grounded (not in so many words obviously but nonetheless effectively grounded as I can’t get to work till at least the third day of Eid) AND he expects me to get my blood tested and report to him before I start going to the office again.
If I hadn’t been shivering from the chills that were overcoming me (my temperature was a little over 103) I might have said bollocks to his face and walked off but hey, who doesn’t start feeling a little sick when he’s in a hospital? So I’m playing the role of the merry absconder while the team sweats it out at the office though anyone who knows me will agree that I couldn’t care less about that.
But the update as this was meant to be is simply that I don’t really have malaria. It’s just that ridiculous doctor who thinks I do.
Admittedly I had a pretty high aspirin resistant fever for nearly two days before I agreed to allow myself to be dragged to the emergency room. And yes I was coughing and shivering and had one helluva sore throat. But it was bloody 6.8 degrees out there. I’m used to lows of around fifteen. Anyways the quack looks at me, goes through the brief medical history thing, the pulse check etc and is acting normally until he learns I just got back from an official trip to a gas field in Dadu (which mind you is a desert and definitely not a place where anything other than heat stroke is endemic) and then he starts muttering, “malaria, malaria” nearly giving me a heart attack. Then the dude looks at my throat and says almost disappointedly, “It’s probably not malaria after all” as if I was just wishing that it might be. It turns out its some kind of bacterial infection. So the guy puts me on fexofenadine and levofloxacine for the infection and the usual aspirin for the fever and this ridiculously ineffective cough syrup the name of which has just slipped my mind. AND he puts me on the whole chloroquine phosphate regimen for a week just to be sure that I don’t have malaria AND he tells me I’m grounded (not in so many words obviously but nonetheless effectively grounded as I can’t get to work till at least the third day of Eid) AND he expects me to get my blood tested and report to him before I start going to the office again.
If I hadn’t been shivering from the chills that were overcoming me (my temperature was a little over 103) I might have said bollocks to his face and walked off but hey, who doesn’t start feeling a little sick when he’s in a hospital? So I’m playing the role of the merry absconder while the team sweats it out at the office though anyone who knows me will agree that I couldn’t care less about that.
But the update as this was meant to be is simply that I don’t really have malaria. It’s just that ridiculous doctor who thinks I do.
