The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [49]
That night, Dr. Guitéras examined Vaughan. “Only a little malaria. You will be all right in a few days. Tomorrow I shall give you quinine.” Guitéras told the nurses to keep Vaughan comfortable and see that he has everything he needs; then he left.
Throughout the night, Dr. Guitéras returned to Vaughan’s bedside—half a dozen times. Vaughan kept his eyes closed and pretended to sleep each time Guitéras entered, but he could always feel the doctor’s touch on his wrist and hand on his brow.
As Guitéras came into the hospital tent the next morning, he was swinging his arms and whistling a tune; he gave the impression of a man who had a long night’s sleep and nothing in the world to worry about.
“Only a little malaria,” Guitéras repeated. “Don’t you think that the air up at the yellow fever hospital on the mountain side is much better than it is down here on this low wet ground?” Defeated, Vaughan said that he was ready to go to the yellow fever hospital and tried to rise from his cot, but Guitéras gently pressed him back down into the bed.
“Your temperature is above one hundred five degrees; your pulse is below forty; a change in position, even the sudden lifting of an arm, might stop your heart. You will not move on any account. Men will come, lift your cot, place it on a flat car, and you will be carried to the yellow fever hospital. I shall go with you.”
Vaughan spent the next week in the yellow fever ward, his stomach painfully contracting and shrinking, only to suddenly burst again with black vomit. He was treated with calomel and a local lemonade made from Epsom salt, lime juice and warm water. One afternoon, another yellow fever patient offered Vaughan a ginger ale. The thought of the carbonated drink was overwhelmingly appealing, but Vaughan cautioned the man to wait another few days. The patient insisted, trying to rise from the bed to find a corkscrew for the bottle.
“Do not move,” Vaughan whispered. “If you must drink the ginger ale, call the orderly and have him pull the stopper. Your heart is crippled and a change in position may kill you.”
The man laughed, rising from the bed, and then fell dead across Vaughan, breaking the cot beneath them. Vaughan called for the orderly, and the body was removed.
Another day, a yellow fever patient bribed an orderly to bring him solid food when he was under orders not to eat. He died within a few hours of the meal. Though his hunger grew intense, Vaughan adhered to his liquid diet of warm lemonade. He also suffered from delusions, believing that he was at once the patient and at other times just observing the patient—a “double consciousness,” he called it.
His temperature climbed toward 106, and he watched the clouds gather over the Sierras. He began to see gods and demons standing on the mountaintop. The clouds grew wilder and thicker, eclipsing the sun and swallowing the world. Each day, those lightning storms and clouds gathered in the mind of Victor Vaughan, until finally, they parted and disappeared suddenly and completely. Vaughan’s fever had broken, though he was now sixty pounds lighter and considerably weaker.
His superior officer prepared orders to send him home by transport, but Vaughan refused, arguing that his new immune statuswould enable him to do even greater work in the hospitals in Cuba. Rather than simply order Vaughan to return, the officer instead told Vaughan to stay as long as he liked and set up a tent for him—just a few feet away from the mess hall. Vaughan could smell the food from the mess, and several times he attempted to get out of his cot and walk there. He was too weak to manage even the short distance and had to crawl on his hands and knees. Vaughan’s superior officer visited him every hour.
“Tomorrow morning a transport leaves for the United States with convalescent soldiers, and I haven’t a doctor to send with them,”