#99 Inconsistencies Shroud Ebola Survivor

August 19, 2016

Features the same – no new pockmarks or Gothic cavities,
But her face looks different in almost every photograph:
Soft and smiling in a maidenly way;
Plain, drawn, dunned;
Professional poise – jaw set firm to produce the seeming smile;
Suburban respectable complete with regrettable hairdo;
Puffed up with pain;
Epitome of relief (visibly tired but no longer pitiable).

The many faces of Pauline Cafferkey are also expressions of the Ebola virus passing through her body and brain after she contracted the disease while volunteering as a Save the Children nurse in Sierra Leone in 2014.

On three separate occasions during the past two years Nurse Cafferkey has been confined to the high-level isolation tent in North London’s Royal Free Hospital. On two of these occasions her condition was designated ‘critical’, i.e. likely to die.

Strict protocols – in theory to prevent Ebola entering Britain,
But in practice these were applied inconsistently:
Returning volunteers muddling in with everyone else at Border Control;
Belatedly siphoned off separately for medical screening;
Reading their own thermometers because not enough staff;
Allowed to proceed even if reportedly running a temperature;
Hugs all round the baggage carousel – no more ‘no touch’ policy;
Home on the Tube or next plane to Glasgow – told to avoid crowds afterwards.

In keeping with these inconsistencies, the public profile of Nurse Cafferkey is suitably ambiguous: on the one hand a medal-winning hero whose dedication to the lives of others nearly cost her her own; on the other hand a risk to public safety recently charged with ‘allowing an incorrect temperature to be recorded’ on her return to Heathrow, and ‘intending to conceal’ from public health officials the raised temperature which turned out to be the first sign of haemorrhagic fever. read more

#70 Love In The Time Of Zika

January 31, 2016

[dropcap]In[/dropcap] Catholic Brazil, rather than Ave Maria, a new lyric:
O Microcephaly, What are you doing to me,
Now you’ve come in to my family?

Boy looks at baby, protectively; guardedly.
Infant body shapes the arms enfolding it – the way they do.
And how do they do that – giving purpose to those long gone without?

In the elder brother’s nostrils – how handsome is the olive boy, how flawless,
Both the smell of newborn and the fumes of his own fear.

From a certain angle he could tell himself it’s just that the child’s cheeks are puffed out.
Swaddled in protective gear, the mutants are the fumigators, spraying the whole town!

But you have to crane your neck to get that; Really this is shrunken baby brain and cranium to match.

Kid Brother’s no Dizzy Gillespie; instead a casualty, likely of the Zika virus, which sounds like rum punch, a type of music or maybe the marque of a car, which it is – Tata Motors’ new hatchback launching in February, if you only change the ‘k’ to a ‘c’; thought to be key in the surge to 3893 cases of microcephaly reported in Brazil since October 2015.

Certainly a lifelong burden and maybe a kind of calling for this poor family.

Unwanted but not left unanswered.

#37 Wellbeing Versus Human Being

October 26, 2014

Plumped-up eyelids and pale skin, tippled pink…..

But the Renee Zellweger of Bridget Jones’ Diary has been replaced by a new Renee – let’s call her Wellzeger, who is tanned and taut and athletic enough to be Australian (in an Elle Macpherson kind of way).

When Ms Zellweger premiered her healthy new look at the Elle magazine Women In Hollywood awards last week, there was much talk of the ‘work’ she had (had) done to achieve it; although she said she was looking better simply because she has learned to live better.

Take your pick, but there is no doubt about the demand of the day: by any means necessary, make me an icon of ‘wellness’; let me exude the idea of rude health, or I may never work in this town again.

Meanwhile, in the pages of Interview magazine…..

Wasted. Blasted. Playing at being brain dead. A bevy of expensively attired legs, bums, breasts and pouty lips splayed out on the filthy floor of a concrete bunker. Slack limbed and glassy eyed, models acting as mannequins in a pantomime of silk and squalor.

The flipside of ‘wellness’, but no antidote; rather, Fabien Baron’s ‘Wasted’ fashion shoot only shows that today’s cult of health and wellbeing is capable of moving in mysterious ways – up to and including its opposite.

Cut from the cult to the case Dr Stella Adadevoh, who died of Ebola after she herself prevented the disease from spreading through Nigeria.

When Patrick Sawyer, a recent arrival from Liberia, was admitted to Dr Adadevoh’s clinic suffering from ‘malaria’, she refused to believe him; more importantly, despite his protests and threats she refused to let him leave the clinic until tested for Ebola. Thetests proved positive and the good doctor was duly rewarded with a dose of the deadly virus.

Dr Adadevoh died alone – though her husband and son were nearby, they were obliged to remain behind a closed window – in a disused TB hospital set aside for Nigeria’s Ebola patients. But thousands if not millions more Nigerians have survived because her decisive action succeeded in limiting the spread of the disease. read more

#36 Three Circles of Hell

October 19, 2014

1) The Abyss of Nothing

‘Whiteout’, said one survivor. ‘Blackout conditions’, said another. A third man reported stumbling through ‘an abyss of nothing.’

These are escapees from the shoulder-high snow and flattening winds which hit theAnnapurna mountain trail unexpectedly last week, at the height of Nepal’s tourist trekking season.

Nearly 40 bodies have been recovered so far; but hundreds have survived – either snatched out of the snow by keen-eyed, sharp-clawed helicopter pilots, or straggling down the mountainside as best they could, clutching at straws which turned out to be guide poles trailing the way down to safety.

Down to the non-descript place where patches of snow give way to blotches of warm earth; and queues of bedraggled survivors look like they’re waiting for the Night Bus home.

Messy.

Yet how splendid it must have been to come down in the world; to re-enter a lower realm of relative comfort, largely as you left it.

When the trekkers went up, however, weren’t they saying goodbye to all that? Pristine, surely, is what they were after. Above the snow line: the absence of things; and theend of men.

‘Blizzard conditions where the ground became the same as the sky and it was difficult to see which way was up and which way was down’, as one survivor described them, are also the preconditions for the Inhuman Being which tourist-trekkies are sort of, kind of looking for – aren’t they?

They may not admit it, and perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it – safer to have said they were searching for the Abominable Snowman.

Whoever he is, they only wanted to touch the hem of his garment; but when the Nepalese weather turned unexpectedly absolute, last week’s search party found themselves draped and dying in it.

2) The Abyss of Everything

A hospital waiting room where there’s no need to wait – surely no such thing. But now there is, in Dallas. Patients have fled the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital after one man died there and two of his nurses contracted the Ebola virus. read more

#28 Big Pharma

August 11, 2014

Forget Jesus – the Resurrection goes by the name of Saa Sabas.

Sabas is a 41-year-old West African pharmacist who contracted what turned out to bethe Ebola virus while nursing his father, who may have been a former nurse in theFrench colonial army.

Unlike Sabas Snr, the son survived. Now nicknamed ‘Anti-Ebola’ and ‘the Revenant’ (who comes again), he volunteers to tell the tale to superstitious villagers as scared oftreatment centres as they are of the disease itself.

And why not? Although at 60 per cent the death rate of the current outbreak is lower than earlier episodes which topped 90 per cent, most incomers into Ebola isolation hospitals still go out through the morgue.

In this context, superstition need not be ‘ancient’; all it takes is a dodgy connection – entirely spurious but almost logical – between the likely demise of the hospitalised andthe medical procedures designed to improve their chances.

For example, nurses and doctors, during the one hour at a time in which they are allowed to work directly with Ebola patients, are swathed head-to-toe in prophylactic plastic – a straightforward measure to stop transmission of bodily fluid and so preventthe virus from spreading. But this might not be the only way it is seen by those on thereceiving end.

Yikes!, cried the emaciated man (10 kilos lost to high fever and dysentery), in between violent hiccups characteristic of the disease, either I strayed into a vintage episode ofDr Who or death is already occurring and I have climbed onto the set of my own autopsy. Dash it all but I should never have come to this terrible place!

(Of course, it is the hiccups – gulp! – which are making him talk like Billy Bunter.)

Thankfully, Saa Sabas was granted immunity from any such syllogism. Having worked at the pharmacy in Gueckedu hospital, medical procedure was in his blood as much asthe Ebola virus. When he fell ill only a few days after his father died, he immediately presented himself for diagnosis and treatment. read more

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Tag Archives: Disease

#99 Inconsistencies Shroud Ebola Survivor

#70 Love In The Time Of Zika

#37 Wellbeing Versus Human Being

#36 Three Circles of Hell

#28 Big Pharma