In September 2016, I was diagnosed with cerebral malaria. That is the second time I was admitted in hospital in three weeks. The first time, I was admitted because of dengue, for four days, and took prescribed medicine for 10 days. I recovered soon enough but within two days after the completion of the prescribed course of medicine, I started to have fever with shivering, intermittently in the evenings once in two days. I just thought its a minor thing, may be a rebound fever for dengue which I just recovered from. But thats not the case- its cerebral malaria, a type of malaria which causes unusual neural activity along with all the symptoms of common malaria. The victim would have a tendency to see visions, hallucinations. Adding to it, in my case doctors detected it in a very critical condition. In fact, the reason I got sick the first time is cerebral malaria but doctors mistook it for dengue and prescribed me medicine for dengue. Cerebral malaria didn’t showed any big symptoms while taking that medicine but it grew inside me. The day I was admitted the second time, have seen a extreme mental behavior in me that I never imagined before.
For the reader to make sense of the significance of my experiences, one has to know some of the details about my childhood, character, principles and beliefs. I was raised in a religious family. My father is a pastor ministering a small pentecostal church in our town. I was raised with biblical principles, beliefs, and ideas of how to live ones life according to god. I seek god in every situation and everything I do is for him. I am good at studies, competent at what I am doing. I was in my college then, when cerebral malaria happened, just figured out what to do with my life, full of energy and hope. It happened just when I was excited about my future, changing my course of life, leaving scars that don’t fade away, even more so defining me for my entire life.
It was a long day, I hurried to bed a little early that day and I felt almost asleep in a moment. I was sleeping sideways, inclined on to the bed, nearly face down. Its making me hard to take my breathe. My heart is racing with panic. I am in a position to show my strength against it but I felt no strength in me. I was stuck for that moment motionless, breathless and weak. Suddenly I came out of the trans and I saw no one in my room. It felt like I was not asleep for much time, just as it happened in real. I was scared that day but I forgot it soon enough and it didn’t bother me again.
The same thing happened again after three months. I was at my cousin’s house. I ended up sharing bed with my cousin brother, because there weren’t enough rooms for all of us. It took me some time to sleep as its a new place. Eventually I was asleep. He was smiling wickedly. His face is very lean as of a very old person. He placed his face on my chest and his body upon my arm. I felt his body on me just like a pack of bones which held me tight not to move. I was scared to death and began screaming. I saw myself screaming hard but no sound came out of my mouth. I tried to move but I couldn’t. He is saying something and held my body very firm. I gone through the same situation of helplessness motionless, breathless and weak. Suddenly I opened my eyes and felt my heart pounding in me. My cousin was sleeping beside me calm and undisturbed. I had a window on my other side, and it made me feel that something came in from that window. I couldn’t able to sleep in that room anymore. I woke my cousin up. We went upstairs to sleep in a church hall. I thought of telling my uncle what happened but I didn’t.
Cerebral malaria happened nearly four months after that second incident. Although both the experiences are dreadful they didn’t disturb me much. Because of the strength from a personal relationship with god. But these situations changed the way how I conceive things. I became strong and mature and now able to distinguish between whats real and whats not. But cerebral malaria took me to the extreme that it took me a long time to recover from it.
It was the day that my friends admitted me in the hospital when I was speaking out of my mind and eventually became unconscious of what happened. I suffered from a very high fever just that afternoon. I took some medicine but it didn’t helped. I had been shivering on my bed under a blanket for two hours not able to sleep or stand up. But after two hours of intense fever, I started feeling good again. I saw a poster on a wall something similar to a painting. I saw it on and off turning my head left and right. The painting seemed to move and rearrange when I wasn’t seeing but stayed still when I was seeing it. Its conclusive that everything will be moving until we conceive it as still. Many arguments came to my mind and suddenly its conclusive that time has an inconsistency and I could make things like they were in the past, with my mind.
A few minutes later I found myself walking in my room, one end to the other, thinking about something. Then I felt needles pierce in to my muscle in my arms near the elbow. Skin didn’t appear to be hurt but I felt pain in the muscle, sharp and crisp. Then my thoughts went towards a particular puzzle or a riddle. It vaguely felt like rearranging some nodes in a connected network to solve for some inconsistency or to create one- to create a cycle or to unwrap it in to a single line. I couldn’t able to find answer for that. I am eagerly trying to solve it but my reasoning is not enough to solve it. . I saw many people inspired to give up because of me. I was terrified of that future, so I was doing everything I could do to avoid it. But I couldn’t able to find a solution. My arms are in ache, my heat pounding and my mind rushing. I was in an extreme in every aspect more than anytime in my life. And after a while, I don’t know how, I found myself sitting on my bed glancing at my cupboard, unhurt.
After sometime I came to the hallway outside my room and as I walked I felt so many people- sitting there and waiting for me to come and speak to them- from the future. I felt like people from the future came back to the past to that particular moment for me to talk. And as I talked I felt people hearing so immersed and it is live streamed to all the theaters over the world, with people listening and discussing over each phonetic I spoke. And then, I thought I have to jump and sing songs, so I did. I thought somebody very near to my heart from my childhood would come to see me, I didn’t knew who. Then some people came- I asked apologies. Somebody came to my room to clean, so I saw through my room for him. Seeing a lamp in my room I said him that it would be the key to the future. What if all the light in the world is decoded and encoded in its physical form to save all the things happened, as a hologram. Also I had unsettling thoughts about second coming, god and computing, that I don’t know how to reason.
Weird things like these happened for four hours till I got fever in the evening. My friends decided that I have to be admitted in the hospital. When I was on the way to hospital I felt the pain in my arms again Then I got unconscious and didn’t remembered what I spoke. Luckily I was at the hospital when an intense fever hit me. All the things that have grown inside me not disturbing came out. Temperature of my body went up to 108 degree. I lived, just because I was in the hospital at that time. Then the doctor pronounced that it was cerebral malaria and that unusual neural activity is common in these cases. That the patients are driven by the extreme thoughts in them. I lost all my physical and mental strength, it took me more than two months to recover completely. But the darkest places I have been had tapped in the deepest parts of my being. After I recovered, after this self-revelatory experience, I re-imagined my life altogether. I wanted to be a story teller since then.
. Because now I know that the stories we tell of our lives has a lot of impact on us and people around us. Even in my life I was inspired, scared, encouraged by the stories I heard about the lives of the people in my life. 