Day 212: Anna Is Sick!

Anna is in bad shape. She’s running a high fever and coughing like hell. It looks like influenza. She won’t consider it.

Has a new strain evolved? Are we going to go through this again?

I’ve called the doctors who used to help the LES DIY, but none of them pick up or call back. Maybe they’re tied up.

I telephoned Mark’s friends—hoping and presuming they haven’t been reading this thing—to see if they can get me some genuine Relenza. I didn’t mention that they owe me for having sullied my name and computer with their (alleged) schemes. The group leader said Mark joined a new crowd. Then came a promising torrent of slick doubletalk.

I had to tell him I’d kill anyone who furnished bogus pharmaceuticals to the woman I love. He seemed to admire my attitude. Here’s hoping.

Day 213: Department of Health Security?

Anna slipped off to work while I slept. The rules for calling in sick are so convoluted that it's wiser for flu conscripts to show up ill. "If they send you home," she said last night, "it's on them, not you."

Judging from the mess I found in the kitchen, she wasn’t feeling better.

I’m still tidying the papers the police scattered, recreating my files as best I can. Some of the documents belong to Anna, who brought them here after the 7^th Precinct tossed her apartment. The rampaging 9^th mixed our papers pretty badly.

NOT FLU: AN EARLY STAGE OF ACUTE APENDICITIS IN A CHILD (Ed Uthman, MD)

So I squat every day in a sunbeam, where Sneeky should be soaking up Vitamin D. I sort documents into stacks he would have delighted in scattering.

Today I found the death certificate of Anna’s little girl, whom I knew to have died of flu in Round One, when they both caught it. It said she was three years old and she died at home, in their apartment near the Manhattan Bridge. Of a ruptured appendix.

I don’t know what this means. I looked up the symptoms. They’re a lot like flu—vomiting, stomach pain, fever, loss of appetite. (Read Carl Zimmer’s ‘Riddle of the Appendix.’) But it wasn’t flu.

I tried to call Anna at work, though it’s forbidden. No answer. I’ll wait.

I called the New York City Department Of Health & Mental Hygiene to ask what specific test they perform on conscripts before they force them to work closely with potential flu carriers. Presumably it was a microneutralization assay that would show antibodies from previous H5N1 exposure. It seemed wise to ask. I was told to expect a callback.

The call came from a different agency. A woman wanted to know why I was asking. I explained. She said she wasn’t authorized to address medical issues. When I called back the number her call left on my caller ID, I reached the Department of Homeland Security.

Day 213 (#2): A New Flu Strain?

Anna called me while she waited for the bus that brings her back to this neighborhood from work. They now confiscate conscripts’ cell phones while they’re on duty. (Do they load them with surveillance apps?) She took a nap instead of eating lunch, so she never got my messages till now.

She sounded woozy, which diminished the fury with which she greeted my question about her daughter’s death certificate. I assured her that I was merely sorting out our papers, not attempting to snoop into hers.

Anna said she’d never claimed her daughter died directly from bird flu. The girl was a collateral casualty who had come down with appendicitis, unusual in kids under 6. The city was in the first blush of pandemic panic and no ambulance was available. Nor were taxis.

Anna had carried her daughter to a hospital just south of City Hall in the financial district, but found only people stretched on the floor inside some locked doors. The place was sealed. As she pleaded for entry, a masked patient pointed to a sign that directed visitors to a bigger hospital north of the East Village, almost two miles away. Then the woman pointed to her chest and to the other patients on the floor and made a throat-cutting motion.

An old Chinese man who didn’t speak English led her to a shop in Chinatown, where he obtained some herbs for the child. He helped her home. By then she was herself gasping, hot-headed.

The little girl died horribly at home that night, when her appendix burst. Enough said.

Anna immediately came down with something she still thinks was the flu. She was feverish, achy, congested, lying for days in the apartment with her daughter’s corpse. She would dream her baby had recovered, sleepwalk to her, and break down all over again.

Recounting the horror made Anna cry so intensely I started dressing to fetch her. I could hear her getting sicker as she sobbed and gasped. Her voice failed as she climbed aboard the bus.

I didn’t say this to her, but I’m scared she’s caught a new strain. I’m trying to get that Relenza while I wait for her to get home.

Day 213 (#3): A Case for Brandeis

Anna just called to say she’s being dropped at a big high school where they examine and treat flu victims. She got the name out before they shut off her cell phone. She hasn’t called back.

I’ve heard of the place, but I had to google to find out where and what it is.

POE WOULD HAVE SNEERED AT MY PRIMITIVE PLANS, APPRECIATED MY FERVOR (Frank Zirbel)Not many of New York’s high schools can boast that Edgar Allan Poe is thought to have penned The Raven on the corner. Founded as the High School of Commerce in 1902 and renamed for America’s first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Louis D. Brandeis High School’s most famous alumnus is Lou Gehrig, the New York Yankees’ Iron Man, whose death was so memorable that they named the disease after him.

Not a good omen for my Iron Angel.

On the other hand, Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) was a magnificent libertarian! He opposed central economic planning, favored individual rights. In 1890 Brandeis began constructing the legal theory for a Constitutional right that we still can't take for granted. In 1928, as a Supreme Court Justice, Brandeis spoke of an American “right of privacy” in a dissent that became law 39 years later, when the Court overturned an earlier ruling he had opposed.

“The greatest dangers to liberty,” he wrote then, “lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

Why am I googling and posting? I’m waiting to see if the Relenza shows up. Anna needs it instantly.

In 1918 flu patients were warehoused in public buildings, too. They served as rooms with food and water. There was no significant medical equipment, no care beyond that which victims with kin might have found at home. They were places in which to die.

I will not let that happen to Anna.

Here are some choice Brandeis quotes while I chew my fingers and wait to see if the guy I’m waiting for has any honor.

“Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.”

“Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”

There’s even one for Hope-Simpson fans: “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."

How much natural wisdom have we forgotten? In this age of triple antibiotic ointment, how many people suspect that sunlight is a disinfectant? Turns out it’s true,  (as this evangelical Christian Web page about sunlight's wonders explains so eloquently).

Day 213 (#4): Eureka!

IT CAN'T BE TOO LATEMy world hasn’t run out of miracles.

The powder and Diskhalers look good. A handshake and a square look still count with me. They have to.