"Empezo"- injection

10.18.09

Last Saturday I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. I wanted to get my hair braided into tiny braids all over my head. One of my Ugandan friends, Martha, agreed to take me where she gets her hair braided. The downfall of the my seemingly brilliant plan was not that it looked bad, in fact it looked really good, it was that it took ten and a half hours. Yes, I did say ten and a half. I had been told it would take five. And after five hours I was still doing alright. But it didn’t stop there, which is where the problem was. I spent around eight hours sitting on a concrete floor and the rest in a chair. It was raining and very cold outside. I didn’t really think anything of the fact that I was shivering uncontrollably. I had not eaten all day and had only stood up once to move to the chair. My body pain and temperature I blamed on lack of movement and the weather. Once I got home I went straight to my bed. I had blankets piled on me but I was still shaking. They felt my head and heat was radiating off my body. My fever had reached 104. We all just thought it was malaria.

After a rough night of little sleep I woke up and felt like I couldn’t move. I lay in bed for a few hours and finally had to get up to go to the bathroom. My left leg felt immobile. Curious as to the case of all my bone and muscle pain in my left leg I lifted my pant leg to see. There were four giant wounds. They appeared to be a poisonous spider bites. All around the wound my skin was rock hard and turning black. I could feel the pain all the way in my bones. Moving my leg caused me to scream out in pain. Morris told me that it was a bacterial infection. We went to a clinic in Iganga. The nurse looks at it and tells me it is chicken pox. At that point she lost all credibility in my book. We told her to just treat me for a bacterial infection. And so I am laying on this table watching the nurse, who thought my bacterial infection was the chicken pox, prepare a shot. She then comes over and tells me to lie down and sleep. I lay down and begin asking “what is the shot you’re about to give me”. She moves it behind her back and replies “what shot? Just sleep”. Now I am getting annoyed, I tell her “the shot you’re holding in your hand, right there. The shot I just watched you make. What did you put in it?” Similar conversation continues for the next minute. The conversation was not as calm as it may sound. The amount of pain I was in was making it hard to function. I guess she wasn’t really happy with me because she literally stabbed me in the butt with the shot. Then she starts making another shot to give me in a vein in the top of my hand. She puts the shot in and wiggles it around a little. Once the needle part is over she hand me a ton of medicine and tells me I need to come back everyday for the next five days to get more shots. The next day I went back for the shots. Each of my hands were completely bruised all around the vein. My condition by that night had not improved but deteriorated. Some volunteers came home that night and convinced me that I really needed to see a real doctor. We left around eight for Kampala to go to the international hospital. The doctor told me that I had a hypersensitive allergic reaction to some kind of bite and it turned into a secondary bacterial infection. The medicine I had been put on at the clinic was doing nothing because it was just general antibiotics. He said my entire leg would have become infected if I had not come. The other medicine the clinic had put me on was for stomach worms. We are still not exactly sure why they gave me that. The doctor put a port in my hand and I began a strong treatment of antibiotics and steroids. My veins were too damaged to put the port in where they normally do so they placed it in the vein coming from my thumb. It was extremely uncomfortable positioning.

I needed to get more shots at eight in the morning and it was already late so we spent the night in the waiting room. I got more shots in the morning and left to go back to Iganga. For the next few days I stayed in Jinja to continue treatment. They had to remove the port in my left hand and put a new one in my right. When they were putting the medicine in my port it was forming a bump in my vein and burning. As upset as I was to be getting a new port I knew it would feel a lot better.

Now I am home in Iganga and feeling much better. The places are my legs are almost healed! Thankfully the week is over and I can get back to Musana soon.