17.

N of 1

It was Thursday when my doctors determined that my particular strain of

E. coli didn’t match the ultraresistant strain that, unaccountably, had
shown up in Israel just at the time I’d been there. But the fact that it
didn’t match only made my case more confounding. While it was
certainly good news that I was not harboring a strain of bacteria that
could wipe out a third of the country, in terms of my own, individual
recovery, it just underscored what my doctors were already suspecting all
too clearly: that my case was essentially without precedent.
It was also quickly moving from desperate to hopeless. The doctors
simply didn’t have an answer for how I could have contracted my illness,
or how I could be brought back from my coma. They were sure of only
one thing: they did not know of anyone making a full recovery from
bacterial meningitis after being comatose for more than a few days. We
were now into day four.
The stress took its toll on everyone. Phyllis and Betsy had decided on
Tuesday that any talk of the possibility of my dying would be forbidden
in my presence, under the assumption that some part of me might be
aware of the discussion. Early Thursday morning, Jean asked one of the
nurses in the ICU room about my chances of survival. Betsy, on the other
side of my bed, heard her and said: “Please don’t have that conversation
in this room.”
Jean and I had always been extremely close. We were part of the
family just like our “homegrown” siblings, but the fact that we were
“chosen” by mom and dad, as they put it, inevitably gave us a special
bond. She had always watched out for me, and her frustration at her
powerlessness over the current situation brought her close to a breaking
point.
Tears came to Jean’s eyes. “I need to go home for a while,” she said.