We are back at school now after a rather lengthy Christmas break. Truth be told, our break didn’t feel much like a break so much as gasping for air and trying to find some semblance of normal. About a week before Christmas Wesley came down with malaria. Which was nuts because he hadn’t had it while we were in Nigeria (none of us had it!) and we had been home for over a month before he got sick!
His malaria symptoms weren’t “classic” symptoms, but they did all line up with how I remember some of my episodes being back in 2004 so despite Paul and I both feeling like it was a little crazy we took him in to the ER and requested a malaria test. The Lord provided abundantly as that evening the attending physician just happened to be very familiar with malaria and the resident doctors were also very familiar with it (one of them having grown up in India and had it multiple times himself.) None of them thought it likely he had malaria, but they were happy to run the test just in case. LONG story short – he did indeed have malaria and was treated for it and is now doing totally fine. The doctors commented on the fact that we must have caught it at the very beginning – it was never more than .1 %, and he definitely did not have any of the bad symptoms that can come with malaria. (Though he did feel awful, even though it wasn’t “that bad”.)
For the curious, his malaria symptoms that made me suspicious were 1. Saturday night he had felt achy, lack of appetite, and a little “off”. (this in and of itself was not alarming. It is flu season!) 2. He was totally fine on Sunday and most of Monday. (again, didn’t think anything of this until…) 3. He got achy on Monday night, as well as having a lack of appetite. He was cold. His temperature was 100.3 – absolutely nothing crazy or anything text booky about this – but I had malaria really bad back in 2014 and it took months for them to sort it all out and I was adamant that that would not be the case for my boy and it is easy enough to rule it out – and simple enough to treat if that’s what it was. Which, as it turned out, is exactly what it was.
Anyways, that same week we were dealing with malaria we were also dealing with a double ear infection in the other boy. And I was having my own health issues – I am fairly certain I had malaria but a visit to my own doctor was futile (he refused to test me) and I never found the time to go in to the ER and the symptoms went away – so who knows! But anyways, that was our Christmas break! And now that we are half way through our first week back at school it feels relieving to have that normality.
But this normality is to be short lived. Tomorrow we pack up and hit the road for a few weeks. We are so excited! I have been planning their school out around our travels and think we are all ready for our road schooling.
I did also want to share that I have started sharing videos on youtube. It’s a new arena for me and it’s definitely going to take some time to find my stride and be comfortable on there (and to remember good lighting for the videos!!) but I thought I would share a couple from this week:
I would love it if you want to follow along on this new adventure!! I am working on one today on how we pack for our trips – over the past year we have cut down to one backpack per person on road trips for all our clothing and it’s SO nice to have so little to put in the car and to pull into homes or hotels!
