We survived the bubonic plague

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 13:00:00 +0000

I forced myself to look at my husband’s feet. They were coal black. His toes looked so dry and brittle that I thought they would snap off if I touched them. The last time I’d talked to him was 16 days ago when the nurse with the thick Queens accent who jokingly called herself Ratched had covered me in full surgical garb and wheeled me briskly past the security guard stationed outside my room to the ICU.

My big, burly, mountain-climbing, life-of-the-party, trial lawyer husband with his deep Texan voice muffled behind an oxygen mask asked me to rub his feet while a doctor gently tried to explain that they needed our permission to perform a procedure so that John’s organs could rest. Now I faced a horrific life or death decision from which there would be no escape.

John and I had been rushed to the emergency room two weeks earlier with a preliminary diagnosis that instilled fear and panic throughout the corridors of a small Manhattan hospital. We had spent two fitful nights in a hotel room fighting intense fevers, chills, aches and extreme exhaustion before admitting to ourselves that we did not have just the flu. The painful, red-hot swelling in my groin area had grown crippling and proved to be the one symptom that led a travel doctor, well versed in global esoteric diseases, to our diagnosis. Pulling a medical journal off his shelf, he pointed to a photograph of a seeping tumor. “See, this is what you have. A bubo.”

Salon.com > Lucinda Marker

We survived the bubonic plague