remittent

Alternately increasing and decreasing in severity or intensity.

A remittent fever is when at certain periods the fever is more violent than at others, but the patient never intirely free from it.

Yet nine years elapsed before it [the dictionary] saw the light. His throes in bringing it forth had been severe and remittent, and at last we may almost conclude that the Caesarian operation was performed by the knife of Churchill, whose upbraiding satire, I dare say, made Johnson’s friends urge him to dispatch.

Of or pertaining to remission of the severity of symptoms.

[…] the long, long fever of life, which with him never knew a remittent moment, had robbed him of that which every man has a right to expect, some pleasure in the course of his existence.

A remittent fever.

If you would have died from fever, you would have died at Ujiji when you had that severe attack of remittent.