Following up on my 7/20 posting “Bad history”, the terrible tale of necrotizing fasciitis (caused by MRSA) in 2003 — now with details that have come out through discussions on Facebook (FB still works, but you have to delete most of the stuff that comes your way to get to actual postings by real friends). Material from these discussions, edited and amplified.
Maggie Tallerman (in the UK) opened the exchanges:
— MT > AZ: You didn’t say if the MRSA was a hospital-acquired bug, which is known for being a thing in this country (hopefully uncommon). I hope it wasn’t. Appalling.
— AZ > MT: It definitely was not. Probably acquired through garden soil — unexpected perils of being a gardener! — though that’s not sure. Not from a hospital or through sexual contact, in any case, since both were absent from my life between June 2003, when my man Jacques died, and November, when the NF suddenly appeared. It is, however, likely that my immune responses were muted by extravagant grief (and, before that, the toll of dementia caregiving).
In a sense I survived through the diagnostic skills of my family doctor, who reckoned, in a phone call, that there were three things that might be the cause of the symptoms that had suddenly appeared, that one was very rare but extremely dangerous, so just in case I had to meet him at Stanford Hospital immediately (and was delivered there by my department’s administrator). Within an hour I was in surgery, and so my life was saved.
— MT > AZ: That is terrifying and amazing. Medals all round.
— AZ > MT: Eventually, I got to elaborately thank everyone involved, notably my primary care physician Jay Schlumpberger (at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation); my department’s administrator (I have, alas, forgotten his name); the colleagues (among them, Penny Eckert) who retrieved the car I had abandoned in a Stanford parking garage and got it back to my condo’s garage; the colleague (Beth Levin) who took over the graduate seminar I was teaching to bring it to some conclusion; the two surgeons from PAMF (Karen Whang in general surgery assisted by Ben Maser in plastic surgery) who were called in on an emergency basis, did the surgeries, oversaw my recovery in the hospital and then the many months of excruciating after-care; the interns who did daily duty in the hospital; the nurses who sat with me for days on end; and then the two friends (Ned Deily and Kathryn Burlingham) who came to give me home health care until I was able to oversee my own care.
You would have expected my daughter, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, to be part of the main story, but she was in Australia, getting married, and was able to participate only through phone calls with Karen Whang; when she and her new husband Paul Armstrong finally got back from Oz, they became part of a demanding twice-daily aftercare program (cleansing the wounds as they very slowly healed; I had a gigantic suppurating cavity in my armpit) that lasted for a long time, until I could be fitted with a machine that sucked out the pus automatically, a machine I could manage on my own.
I also apologized to the grad students in the seminar I was teaching; Doug Ball, who was (oh dear) in his very first quarter of grad school, has commented sweetly on this blog, but having a professor nearly die on you at the very beginning of the ordeal of graduate school is a hard, unsettling blow to endure.
Then Heidi Harley (at the University of Arizona) joined in:
— HH > AZ: I hadn’t known this story. “A good line of patter helps,” you write. You got that, my dude. Sorry for your pain, and the bad history that caused it.
— AZ > HH: I was stunned to see that I had failed to post about this experience, by far the most disastrous of my life, and the end of the life I had lived before. I certainly talked to people about it. But I see now that when I became a blogger on Language Log, soon afterwards, I never told the story there, or later, on my own blog. (Even the most self-reflective and utterly open person can have blind spots.) I suppose it was just too painful to talk about, too hard to rehearse how diminished I’d become. (I see now that in the current posting I failed to mention that I once was a serious (classical) pianist, but through NF lost the use of my right hand, so that was gone*; I’d also been a serious collagist, and that too was now gone (no more careful cutting with scissors).
[* A former friend insisted that I had to man up and learn the literature for piano left hand, and taxed me bluntly for accepting my disability and finding ways to work around it (rather than devoting several months to acquiring a new form of skilled performance); he was a good guy in many ways, but not the first straight guy to accuse me of a lack of masculinity because I failed to adhere to norms of the bro code that I consider to be irrational and harmful; apparently, even fags have to be macho, or else we’re doubly failures as men: first, a failure through our desire for men rather than women, a desire that straight guys routinely understand as feminine**; and then a wimpish failure to meet the demands of macho masculinity. I shut him out of my life and have never spoken to him since. (As my friends and family say, don’t make him angry; you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.)]
[** (I can’t resist saying this) 😀Not that there would be anything wrong with that😀)
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