The Hot Zone Read Online Free Page B

and these hemorrhages were now as black as pitch.
    Monet’s coma deepened, and he never regained consciousness. He died in the intensive care unit in the early hours of the morning. Dr. Musoke stayed by his bedside the whole time.
    They had no idea what had killed him. It was an unexplained death. They opened him up for an autopsy and found that his kidneys were destroyed and that his liver was destroyed. It was yellow, and parts of it had liquefied—it looked like the liver of a cadaver. It was as if Monet had become a corpse before his death. Sloughing of the gut, in which the intestinal lining comes off, is another effect that is ordinarily seen in a corpse that is several days old. What, exactly, was the cause of death? It was impossible to say because there were too many possible causes. Everything had gone wrong inside this man, absolutely everything, any one of which could have been fatal: the clotting, the massive hemorrhages, the liver turned into pudding, the intestines full of blood. Lacking words, categories, or language to describe what had happened, they called it, finally, a case of “fulminating liver failure.” His remains were placed in a waterproof bag and, according to one account, were buriedlocally. When I visited Nairobi, years later, no one remembered where the grave was.
1980 JANUARY 24
    Nine days after the patient vomited into Dr. Shem Musoke’s eyes and mouth, Musoke developed an aching sensation in his back. He was not prone to backaches—really, he had never had a serious backache—but he was approaching thirty, and it occurred to him that he was getting into the time of life when some men begin to get bad backs. He had been driving himself hard these past few weeks. He had been up all night with a patient who had had heart problems, and then, the following night, he had been up most of the night with that Frenchman with hemorrhages who had come from somewhere upcountry. So he had been going nonstop for days without sleep. He hadn’t thought much about the vomiting incident, and when the ache began to spread through his body, he still didn’t think about it. Then, when he looked in a mirror, he noticed that his eyes were turning red.
    Red eyes—he began to wonder if he had malaria. He had a fever now, so certainly he had some kind of infection. The backache had spread until all the muscles in his body ached badly. He started taking malaria pills, but they didn’t do any good, so he asked one of the nurses to give him an injection of an antimalarial drug.
    The nurse gave it to him in the muscle of hisarm. The pain of the injection was very, very bad. He had never felt such pain from a shot; it was abnormal and memorable. He wondered why a simple shot would give him this kind of pain. Then he developed abdominal pain, and that made him think that he might have typhoid fever, so he gave himself a course of antibiotic pills, but that had no effect on his illness. Meanwhile, his patients needed him, and he continued to work at the hospital. The pain in his stomach and in his muscles grew unbearable, and he developed jaundice.
    Unable to diagnose himself, in severe pain, and unable to continue with his work, he presented himself to Dr. Antonia Bagshawe, a physician at Nairobi Hospital. She examined him, observed his fever, his red eyes, his jaundice, his abdominal pain, and came up with nothing definite, but wondered if he had gallstones or a liver abscess. A gall-bladder attack or a liver abscess could cause fever and jaundice and abdominal pain—the red eyes she could not explain—and she ordered an ultrasound examination of his liver. She studied the images of his liver and saw that it was enlarged, but, other than that, she could see nothing unusual. By this time, he was very sick, and they put him in a private room with nurses attending him around the clock. His face set itself into an expressionless mask.
    This possible gallstone attack could be fatal. Dr. Bagshawe recommended that Dr.