Plague Years by Ross A. Slotten MD

Author:Ross A. Slotten, MD [Slotten, , MD, Ross A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000 Biography & Autobiography / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

One of the patients I had rounded on before departing for Africa was David. Before this latest hospitalization I’d seen him so often in my office for various problems that he seemed more like a friend to me than a patient. He now called me Ross instead of Dr. Slotten, a sign of affection as well as respect. This would be the last time I’d see him alive. Pausing at the room’s threshold in my gray coat, I scanned the clipboard on which his vital signs were recorded. His blood pressure had dropped to dangerously low levels, and in compensation his heart beat at a very high rate. Nearly every organ was failing: his kidneys had shut down so he produced no urine; his heart pumped ineffectually, compounding his inability to shed fluid that accumulated in his lungs, belly, and legs; and his bone marrow had stopped producing blood cells, essential for carrying oxygen and fighting off infections.

With a sigh I entered David’s room, which was silent except for his labored breathing and the hissing of oxygen. In response to my questions about pain and comfort, he grunted a few unintelligible words that were muffled by the plastic oxygen mask pressed against his nose, cheeks, and mouth. I leaned over his bed in a fruitless effort to understand him. Staring at his wasted arms, torso, and sweaty body, I recalled when he was robust and vibrant and the prospect of dying seemed remote. Now the moment we had dreaded for months approached. Struggling under the mask to catch his breath, he’d turned an indescribable shade of gray, a color between the pink of life and the blue of death. I squeezed his hand with affection but didn’t receive the usual response. Letting the limp, cool, and swollen fingers slip from my grasp, I stroked the stubble of his beard with the back of my hand. “Goodbye, David,” I said softly and left the room.

There were so many others like David in my practice now, though none at the time so close to death. Those men would still be here when I returned from Africa, but they’d already begun their journey down a path whose tracks were vanishing like footprints in wave-washed sand. Such sadness, such unbearable sadness, I thought. I kept hearing Kurtz’s words from Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness: “The horror, the horror!” Although those words were uttered in a different context, they still resonated for me as I left David’s bedside and the ward. The horror, the horror! I imagined my hands pressed against my skull like that Edvard Munch portrait of a woman screaming on a bridge. Like her, I wanted to run away from a living hell.

By 1991 I’d lost hundreds of patients from AIDS, and the number increased with each year. June 5 had marked the unofficial anniversary of the epidemic, ten years since the Centers for Disease Control published its report. Since then 180,000 AIDS cases had been reported in the United States; there were more than ten million cases worldwide.

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