Night fever

Most of the day was taken up productively, plunging into life admin, chores and meeting with Alison about my future involvement in the South Sudan programme. A new post has been created at our organisation that covers management of the East Africa programme portfolio, and South Sudan has been wrapped into that. I haven't won the role so my involvement will have to change, but it was still a positive discussion about future ideas.

Recycling centre visited, Fray Bentos pie consumed and post-trip laundry washed and hung out.

Early evening I started having chills, fever and backache, which along with the persistent headache I'd been harbouring, compelled me to seek medical support for ruling out (or confirming) malaria.

I ended up waiting around Addenbrookes in Cambridge late in the evening for an out of hours doctor, who turned out to be the father of a good friend who moved to the Falkland Islands a few years ago. I was turfed into A&E for blood tests and there happened to be a tropical diseases registrar on duty that night, who said, coming from South Sudan and being exposed to so much, I was every infectious diseases doctor's dream patient.

I hadn't expected to be seen as I thought A&E on Friday nights was full of people who'd been glassed or slipped off a kerb outside the kebab shop. Although the NHS is a labyrinthine behemoth and the way information is passed between each department, helpline and colleague resembles a massive game of Chinese whispers, it's a fantastic creation and I'm hugely grateful for how seriously they took it and how promptly they saw me.

Picture of a building at Pembroke, one of the few Cambridge colleges where it's free to wander at leisure, after a stuffed potato skin in the dining hall. The colours were nice and autumnal today.