Tick Bite Fever

Yes indeed.  Well it didn’t take long to get, and theres two reasons Im oddly happy.  Firstly it feels like it’s a sure sign Im here – the assurance of contracting a (mild) African illness.  But more importantly, Im chuffed that it was such a mild one.  I’d hear stories, oh yes.  A bogeyman to watch out for, especially after all those pepper-tick bites at Mkambati. Be careful, after a ten day incubation period, you could be in serious discomfort. 

 And so I woke on Sunday morning with a peculiar mosquito bite between the toes that was puffy but not too itchy, and the lymph gland in that side of the groin was tender… getting out of bed and vertical produced a searing headache for just one second, then the blood pressure change seemed to equalize. I made breakfast, and as I lay down to bed again the same instantaneous headache, it passed and I felt comfortable.  I read some journal papers and thought best to take it easy.  The ‘taste of a flu’ was in my mouth and I remembered to keep hydrated.  I’d heard that classic TBF signs are about a purple tick bite site, persistent gnarly headaches, high fevers, and lymph pains, so in typical fashion I thought to myself ‘well its nowhere that bad, lets just see how I feel tomorrow’. (Doctors are scary… they tell you you are diseased!)

So Tomorrow came and went much the same.  Then I got up cheerfully on Wednesday and rolled into university.  Noticing as I walked into the office that I was Lymp(h)ing on that leg, Colleen suggested to see the Student Health Clinic.  After consulting with a few other post-grads in the department who gave me a broader picture of the onset of TBF, particularly the one about ‘that’s how it starts, then it spreads all over and you get relapsing fevers’, I hurried over to the nurses clinic.  I had another laugh when I walked into the consult room, as the nurse sounded much sicker than me!  Having just suffered an asthma attack that morning she could barely speak to me, I thought to myself Im going to be better off keeping away from this cesspool of disease… But 15 minutes later and I walked out of there with some vivid green pills.  Twice a day for a week should limit the intensity and duration of the symptoms.  Later that day the little purple sign at the bite site came to say hello.

The black lesion at the bite is an eschar

Doxycycline destroys Rickettsia africae... bombs away

Today, except for the colour and swelling at the bite, I feel back to normal.  While abseiling and rock-climbing this afternoon, there was none of the feared pain of the harness tight on the groin lymph gland, and none of the headache or fever despite the unseasonal heat and humidity. Lush.  Maybe I’d been exposed a few years back in Kenya, but it could have been suppressed because we were taking Doxy for malaria at the time.  Tick Bite Fever is meant to get milder and milder at subsequent exposures. I’ll be sure to finish this course of antibiotics, now that I’ve just started.  

I learnt many new facts about TBF this week!