Vivid Dreams and Hypochondria

The malaria pills are driving me nuts; vivid dreams see me chasing Ryanair flights with never-ending obstacles, friends dying of strange illnesses and unexplained events that take a long time to play out.

Since leaving Aburi Gardens a few weeks ago, I had received about 15 missed calls and 9 un-responded-to text messages from Frank the woodblock artist by Monday last week. They were all fairly benign, “hello Fiona, how are you?”; “How is work today?”; “to day I am not feeling fine”. By Monday evening I was losing my rag. I had given him my number because he was carving me something, but this was now bordering on insanity. When the phone buzzed again and the detail “Frank Aburi” flashed  across the screen, I looked at Kati and said, “right, that’s it…”; I seized my phone to write a purposeful response, but the message read, “Am doing your work maybe will finish it tomorrow. Will call you”. I sighed and went to bed.

I had fallen asleep on my phone and was awoken at 4:37 by the phone vibrating in the small of my back to a text message from Frank, which read “Fiona, to day is my birthday”. I rolled over and fell back asleep and when I awoke and moved onto my side, I saw that an army of ants had taken over the left side of my bed. I suspected the cleaner had sprayed bug spray, as something had caused the wings to fall off some flying insects which had then fallen on my bed. The bodies, however, still wiggled along like worms until they slowly perished. Several of these bodies had been captured by the ants that, in silent teamwork, were transporting them to some barracks somewhere. My stomach hurt from chillies the night before and felt like a little monster was trying to crawl out through the front wall. I lay there until Isaac came to take me to hospital.

The fatigue had become a point of worry, and I was starting to suspect that it might be down to side effects from the anti-malaria medicine, as the feeling of an acid lump in my throat- a known side-effect of the Doxycycline- had become a constant. The protocol is to queue at a grubby little cashier every time you need something new. It was a bit like a health duke box. First I needed to see a doctor, so I took my receipt and queued outside the doctor’s door. I explained the symptoms. Next I had to go and pay again at the cashier and take the receipt to the lab test, where they took a sample of my blood and I had to sit and wait for an hour for the results. Then I had to go back to the doctor, though having already been inside meant I could push in the queue. The doctor looked at the results, told me I was fine and recommended that I take multi-vitamins.

Great. Fours hours had gone by and I had discovered I was paranoid; I was suffering from hypochondria.