Miles In Missions

I’m glad to be back home, but Cape Town is an amazingly beautiful place where I could stay for a long time. Not having my family there made it completely boring though. I was expecting to have to stay there longer, but thankfully the healthcare system in South Africa is amazing and the Doctor had everything planned for me ahead of time.

I left Nigeria on a Monday, arrived in South Africa on Tuesday, and saw the Doctor for the first time on Wednesday. He planned for me to be admitted to the hospital the next day for an overnight stay and would have all my testing done right away. Everything went so amazingly fast that I was done with everything by 4:00pm and I didn’t even have to stay the night at the hospital! The following Monday I met with the doctor for the results (explained below) and the results were so good that I had no reason to stay in South Africa as long as I had originally expected. I called the airlines and changed my tickets for Wednesday and made it back home to Nigeria a full 10 days ahead of time.

As far as my health, it’s all great news. I’m am very healthy… Praise God! The only health concerns are… Gastritis and High Cholesterol causing a “fatty liver”.

An ultrasound found that my liver is a little big and they call it a fatty liver. The doctor told me, without having seen the blood tests results yet, that it is most likely caused by high cholesterol and the blood test results later confirmed it. My cholesterol is elevated, but not bad enough to treat with medicine. A change of diet and exercise should help all of this in some time.

Next, they did the gastroscopy and found no ulcers, took some biopsies, and found that I have gastritis which is inflammation of the stomach lining, but no cancers, etc. It can be caused by diet, but the doctor and I think it could be a result of long-term use of ibuprofen or the combination of the two.

Thats it.

As far as malaria, the doctor and I are in agreement that there is no way I actually had malaria that many times. He suspects that I was sick each time, but it was most likely a false positive or poor lab technician giving the wrong diagnoses and I was actually sick with something else giving many of the same symptoms of malaria. The doctor basically said that just as one person is allergic to poison ivy and another isn’t or that seasonal allergies affect some while others not at all, is most likely how my body is different in fighting small bugs and infections from most other expats in our field. The gastritis could also be contributing to my symptoms producing diarrhea, nausea, and cramping. They did a test to see if malaria is in my blood down to the molecular level. They found none and that means that it is not living in my liver and not lying dormant. I have no malaria in my blood. He does want me to change to a different medicine for preventing malaria.

They checked my liver, kidneys, gallbladder, and other major organs with ultrasound and combined with blood tests, everything is functioning normally. My immune system is fine. They tested for Schistosomiasis and it is negative. Stool given is completely clean (oxygen-moron?) no parasites or bad bacteria.

The doctors biggest takeaway from our discussions was that in my history I mentioned that I am never sick when I am away from Nigeria. He kept saying, “It’s your environment”. This is when he explained that my body acts differently to the normal things of Nigeria that other people’s bodies tolerate easily. It is just what each of us is genetically predisposed to handling with our immune systems.

We are extremely thankful that our health insurance with SIM is great. When being treated outside of the USA they cover 100% of the medical costs. If I had come to the USA for treatment, there would have been a large deductible in addition to all travel costs.

That’s really the best summary I can give. Thank you all for your prayers during this time. We appreciate all of you and once again your prayers have worked for our family!

Here are some extra pictures of my trip…