As a Peace Corps volunteer, one normally accepts diarrhea as a part of life and something that may come and go every few weeks for the entire 27 months. One volunteer actually told us during training that, “You aren’t a Peace Corps volunteer until you shit you pants”.
I prided myself throughout training at the fact that I was one of the few lucky trainees to not fall victim to diarrhea, nausea, food sickness, weird rashes, or any of the other random things happening to people. Furthermore, I didn’t even get the weird dreams that some people experienced under Mephaquin before getting switched to Doxycycline. My health was superb; I ate what I wanted, when I wanted and even enjoyed “dangerous” foods such as fou-fou, a mashed yam dish, or tchouk, the local brew made from sorghum.
My long stretch of good health started to run out after biking the 20km round trip one Wednesday afternoon to Sanda-Kagbanda for a business skills club meeting at the local Lycee. After arriving back at my house, I was exhausted and could feel a mild rise in my body temperature. To quell the attack, I drank a lot of water and went to bed early, leaving my yam fries and spaghetti behind uneaten. The next morning I felt loads better and by 9:00 A.M. I managed to get an appetite so I ate the previous night’s food although stopping halfway to finished after smelling something spoiled.
The same day I left for Bassar, which later turned out to be a mild blessing because the volunteer there, Amy, has something like mini-America inside her hospitable three-room tile-floored home. Since I wasn’t feeling well the night before, Kassie and I took taxi motorcycles to her house and hung out for the day. Things were going well until about noon when my health gradually went downhill further. A few hours after eating the spoiled food, I threw it up leaving a nasty, rotten taste of yams in my mouth yet giving my body the satisfaction that one always feels after finishing a fit of vomiting.
That afternoon, I developed a very harsh pain in my lower right stomach and even made my back ache in an odd way unlike anything I had felt before. My temperature gradually rose again, this time around 102 degrees. My Dr. Mom for the moment, Amy the health volunteer in Bassar, gave me ibuprofen and Tylenol to control the pain and lower my fever.
At the same time, my diarrhea became something of an extreme level and showed no signs of stopping despite using Pepto-Bismol and drinking lots of water. I mean LOTS of water. I must have drunk at least 8 to 10 liters per day and two of those liters were mixed with Oral Rehydration Salts supplied by the Med-Unit in Lomé. Despite all of this hard work, four days passed without improvement while dehydration and weakness continued to progress to the point where I would get tired walking to the bathroom and I would begin to feel light-headed if I remained standing, or even sitting, for more than about 30 seconds. I simply could not rehydrate my body fast enough.
The Med-Unit officer told me that I would need a “stool” sample. In layman’s terms, I would need to have my crap analyzed at the Bassar hospital. This seemed like a simple task, yet I was unable to walk outside let alone across town. Amy would become my savior; my saving grace. She would do the favor that no one wants to do and she will hold it against for the rest of our lives. She transported my poop in a plastic bag to the hospital for the analysis while I continued to lie in agony on her living room floor.
After running around town to chase down the lab technician and waiting for the results, Amy came back home with my very own Carnet de Santé to prove my illness, prescribe a remedy for this perpetual diarrhea, while most importantly serving as one of the best souvenirs of my time in Togo. We were somewhat shocked by the results because I carried basically everything the parasites had to offer through poor water sources just shy of Dysentery.
A direct translation from my Carnet de Santé:
Specimen: Liquid Feces
Cool State: Presence of
- Numerous forms of vegetative cists of Entamoeba kistolyliea.
- Some vegetative forms of Giardia intestinalis
This was a pretty exciting moment. I had heard earlier from other volunteers that the stool samples rarely actually showed the evidence of something alive so one might have to just live it out without being prescribed medicine from the Peace Corps medical office. It was a relief that this wasn’t the case. After receiving this information, I was put on Fasogyne to kill off all those little critters in my gut. The medicine was a life saver. Within 24 hours, there was a great improvement in my health and I could finally pace around the room long enough to appease my usual habit before becoming light headed.
In retrospect, the problems weren’t too severe and didn’t give me much worry because I knew that the Peace Corps medical office was on my side. For a local person, lacking money, and especially a child, what happened to me could have very well killed someone without quality health support.
Some great finds in the Kabou market recently:
