Opinion
I recently read a news story reporting the death of a man who had received a kidney transplant. All had seemed to go well, but not long after the transplant, the man became confused, had trouble swallowing, experienced weakness in his legs and could barely walk, suffered hallucinations, and had serious neck pain. Shortly after the onset of these symptoms, he was found unresponsive in his home. He was hospitalized but never regained consciousness, and after several days he was declared brain dead and removed from life support. It was initially thought that he’d had a cardiac arrest, which was held to be the cause of his death.
It turned out that the transplant recipient had died of rabies. This was odd as he’d had no contact with an infected animal. Seeking an answer, medical authorities took biopsy samples from the donor’s kidneys and found silver-haired bat rabies. Questioning the donor’s family, authorities discovered that he had been protecting a kitten from an aggressive skunk. In the course of driving the skunk away, he’d been scratched and infected with the bat rabies. This means that an infected bat had infected the skunk, who had infected the donor who’d died and whose gift of a kidney had infected the organ recipient who also died.
It reminded me of a story I’d read many years ago — a young boy born and raised and never out of his hometown of Minneapolis became ill and was admitted to a local hospital. Treated for what was thought to be his illness, his condition grew worse. Doctors and nurses were baffled. They tried a variety of treatments, but to no avail. The boy’s condition continued to deteriorate until one day, a visiting doctor who’d worked in sub-Saharan Africa was among the hospital staff members attending the young patient.
“He has malaria,” this doctor told the others.
“Malaria, that’s impossible. He’s never been outside of Minnesota.”
“That may be, but he has malaria.”
The boy was tested and indeed he was suffering from malaria, which had been introduced into his system when he received a transfusion of malaria-infected blood. He was treated and made a full recovery. This story felt personal to me as I’d worked in sub-Saharan Africa in my late twenties. After returning home to the States, I went to give blood. The form I filled out to be a donor had a series of questions, including one about whether I’d been in a malarial zone. Answering yes, I was tested and informed that I was malaria positive — a carrier of malaria, even though I had no symptoms at that time. I was unable to give blood.
But somehow, a donor had provided infected blood that was given to the boy in Minneapolis, who then might have died if not for the experience of one visiting doctor. And had I not been asked to fill out that form before giving blood, I, too, might have been the cause of another person’s illness.
I tell these stories not to suggest failings on the part of medical practitioners or hospitals. Rather, I’m interested in the fragility of life. When we are told we have an incurable disease, it often hits us that we are dying, even though we know we’re dying from the moment we’re born. We’re standing on a banana peel, ready to slip. We just try to keep our balance and not think about our deaths too much. And we probably shouldn’t, as it may not help us to live full lives if we spend a lot of time worrying about the end of those lives.
Still, the fragility of life is there waving its delicate hand at us, and sometimes it does me good to wave back. I look out the window and watch the wind blowing the bare branches of the trees and the rain falling so unseasonably in winter, turning now to snow. Here’s a stand of faded white phlox along the edge of the deck where I sit on late summer mornings to have a coffee and listen to the clouds moving across the sky as if they are singing.
I am reminded to be grateful for the life I have been given. Or if grateful is not the most useful notion, to be aware, to awaken to the life that surrounds me, which means to awaken to my own life inside of which my death waits. And I’m never to know when it might come for me. It’s strangely consoling while also being a little frightening. How fragile is the web of life, which is also unbreakable, a line tying each of us to the other.