Sidenote: Michelina was in Ghana with a group from her school before she met up with ISA in Granada
I don’t even know where to begin with this other than at the beginning, a whole two days after getting to Meknes. So, it was our first Friday in Meknes and Michelina was out buying a phone when she started feeling really tired and faint. I was at home because there was company over, and when she got home, she told me she had to go to sleep, and she did. Over the next couple days she slept almost non-stop. She would get up every now and then to try and eat, eat a few bites of food, then have to lie down because she was dizzy, and then fall asleep. Our host mom and dad thought it was just from all the traveling and was totally normal because just about every American who comes here gets sick at some point. My red flags started going off sooner, but I figured I was just being paranoid. The extremity of her fatigue, back pain, and the fact that she told me, “I think this is the most water I ever drank in my life but I haven’t peed in three days” all made me very uncomfortable, but as I said, I thought I was just being paranoid. I always forget how accurate my gut feelings can be... Anyway, by Tuesday morning our host parents decided she needed to go to the hospital to get some blood tests done. They tested her for malaria, which came back negative. She slept in the hospital for a couple of nights before they found out that she had Leptospirosis on Thursday (I think). This is a bacteria that attacks your kidneys (explains the back pain and lack of urination) that I had already heard of because there was an outbreak of it in Nicaragua while I was in Costa Rica. Now that she was being treated, she started to get better. However, when I visited her on Friday, she looked worse than I had seen her since she got sick. She told me that she had malaria, too. She had spiked a fever that was higher than the bacteria should have caused, so the doctors decided to do the malaria test again since it can take a while to become active and detectable, and found that she had the most dangerous strain of malaria. If left untreated once symptoms develop, it can be fatal in just a few days, so it is a good thing she was already in the hospital! Since she had been taking anti-malaria drugs and no one else on her trip got sick at all, my theory is that she ate something contaminated with the bacteria, which then messed up her immune system and her body’s processing of the malaria pills, thereby giving the malaria a chance to thrive. Other people in her group may have gotten bitten by a mosquito with the strain of malaria, but they didn’t get the bacteria so their pills should have been working fine. Anyway, after that, it was just a long road to recovery, with her staying in the hospital another week after the malaria was detected, and then being kind of weak after she was released. One little bright side to all of this was that the insurance we have with ISA covers travel expenses for one family member to visit if a student is hospitalized for more than 24 hours (or gets a felony), so her mom came to Meknes to visit for a week.
I don’t even know where to begin with this other than at the beginning, a whole two days after getting to Meknes. So, it was our first Friday in Meknes and Michelina was out buying a phone when she started feeling really tired and faint. I was at home because there was company over, and when she got home, she told me she had to go to sleep, and she did. Over the next couple days she slept almost non-stop. She would get up every now and then to try and eat, eat a few bites of food, then have to lie down because she was dizzy, and then fall asleep. Our host mom and dad thought it was just from all the traveling and was totally normal because just about every American who comes here gets sick at some point. My red flags started going off sooner, but I figured I was just being paranoid. The extremity of her fatigue, back pain, and the fact that she told me, “I think this is the most water I ever drank in my life but I haven’t peed in three days” all made me very uncomfortable, but as I said, I thought I was just being paranoid. I always forget how accurate my gut feelings can be... Anyway, by Tuesday morning our host parents decided she needed to go to the hospital to get some blood tests done. They tested her for malaria, which came back negative. She slept in the hospital for a couple of nights before they found out that she had Leptospirosis on Thursday (I think). This is a bacteria that attacks your kidneys (explains the back pain and lack of urination) that I had already heard of because there was an outbreak of it in Nicaragua while I was in Costa Rica. Now that she was being treated, she started to get better. However, when I visited her on Friday, she looked worse than I had seen her since she got sick. She told me that she had malaria, too. She had spiked a fever that was higher than the bacteria should have caused, so the doctors decided to do the malaria test again since it can take a while to become active and detectable, and found that she had the most dangerous strain of malaria. If left untreated once symptoms develop, it can be fatal in just a few days, so it is a good thing she was already in the hospital! Since she had been taking anti-malaria drugs and no one else on her trip got sick at all, my theory is that she ate something contaminated with the bacteria, which then messed up her immune system and her body’s processing of the malaria pills, thereby giving the malaria a chance to thrive. Other people in her group may have gotten bitten by a mosquito with the strain of malaria, but they didn’t get the bacteria so their pills should have been working fine. Anyway, after that, it was just a long road to recovery, with her staying in the hospital another week after the malaria was detected, and then being kind of weak after she was released. One little bright side to all of this was that the insurance we have with ISA covers travel expenses for one family member to visit if a student is hospitalized for more than 24 hours (or gets a felony), so her mom came to Meknes to visit for a week.
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