Tick Bite Fever! - by John

Well, it as been an interesting week, and has led to our first encounter with the South African health system. Last Sunday night, Charlene notices a large red boil on my back, which was unsightly to be sure, but not painful and so I didn’t think anything of it. Monday I traveled to Jo’burg with Chuck for a meeting, and one the way their I noticed that one of my lymph nodes under my arm was hard, and as the day progressed it was getting bigger and painful to touch. Not only that, but I was feeling lousy, lightheaded, nauseous, tired, what was going on? I got back home late Tuesday, my lymph node was big and red and extremely tender, and so we consulted our home medical reference, which said “go to see a doctor immediately”(!). Oh oh!

Wednesday morning I called the doctors office, and much to my surprise I was given an appointment almost immediately. Co-incidentally, Danica was feeling under the weather too, so we both got appointments for the same time. We got to the clinic on time, but the receptionist told us that there had been a big emergency earlier that morning, and that things were running late, and, terribly sorry, we would have to wait. Which we did, for all of five minutes.

When we sat down with the Doctor (Dr. Reinike) and I started to describe my symptoms, she almost immediately said “TICK BITE FEVER”. Of course, it all sounded very…African, and my mind raced forward, seeing nasty parasites crawling out of orifices, gallons of blood, etc etc. Dr Reinike calmy explained that it was a bacteria that gets into your blood after a tick bite, that a short course of antibiotics would clear things up right away, and that this was a common disease that even “a village policeman could diagnose”. After she wrote us a prescription, we went back out to the receptionist to pay (MCC is self insured, so you pay cash for all your medical care), and found out that the appointment had cost us about $30 each.

Next stop the pharmacy, where I promptly got 10 antibiotic pills, for the grand sum of $1.25. All in all, our first experience with the South African health care system was great, and the "system" seems both inexpensive and responsive. However, I know that there are people in our community that cannot afford the doctors visits or even the pills, and I wonder about how even relatively trivial issues like Tick Bite Fever affect them, not to mention the ever present shadow of AIDS.

This is a picture of Mavis Shongwe and myself. Mavis coordinates the hospitality functions at C4L. If you look closely, you can see a tick biting me. My eyes are closed because I am flinching from the tick bite. The ticks around here are a little bigger than at home.