"Richard Preston - The Hot Zone2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

maintain circulation, so his heartbeat was very sluggish, and blood
pressure was dropping toward zero. He needed a blood transfusion.
A nurse brought a bag of whole blood. Dr. Musoke hooked the bag on a
stand an inserted the needled into the patient's arm. There was something
wrong with the patient's veins; his blood poured out around the needle.
Dr. Musoke tried again, putting the needle into another place in the
patient's arm and probing for the vein. Failure. More blood poured out.
At every place in the patient's arm where he stuck the needle, the vein
broke apart like cooked macaroni and spilled blood, and the blood ran from
the punctures down the patient's arm and wouldn't coagulate. Dr. Musoke
abandoned his efforts to give his patient a blood transfusion for fear
that the patient would bleed to death out of the small hole in his arm.
The patient continued to bleed from the bowels, and these hemorrhages were
now as black as pitch.
Monet's coma deepened, and he never regained consciousness. He died
in the intensive care unit in the early hours of the morning. Dr. Musoke
stayed by his bedside the whole time.
They has no idea what had killed him. It was unexplained death.
They opened him up for an autopsy and found that his kidneys were
destroyed and that his liver was dead. His liver had ceased functioning
several days before he died. It was yellow, and parts of it had
liquefied-it looked like the liver of a three-day-old cadaver. It was as
if Monet had become a corpse before his death. Sloughing of the gut, in
which the intestinal ling comes off, is another effect that is ordinarily
seen in a corpse that is days old. What, exactly, was the cause of death?
It was impossible to say because there were too many possible causes.
Everything had gone wrong inside this man, absolutely everything, any one
of which could have been fatal: the clotting, the massive hemorrhages, the
liver turned into pudding, the intestines full of blood. Lacking words,
categories, or language to describe what had happened, they called it,
finally, a case of "fulminating liver failure". His remain were placed in
a waterproof bag and, according to one account, buried locally. When I
visited Nairobi, years later, no one
remembered where the grave was.

1980 JANUARY 24

NINE DAYS AFTER the patient vomited into Dr. Shem Musoke's eyes and mouth,
Musoke developed an aching sensation in his back. He was not prone to
backaches-really, he had never had a serious backache, but he was
approaching thirty, and it occurred to him that he was getting into the
time of life when some men begin to get bad backs. He had been driving
himself hard these past few weeks. He had been up all night with a
patient who had heart problems, and then, the following night, he had been
up most of the night with that Frenchman with hemorrhages who ha come from
somewhere upcountry. So he had been going nonstop for days without sleep.
He hadn't thought much about the vomiting incident, and when the ache
began to spread through his body, he still didn't think about it. Then,
when he looked in a mirror, he noticed that his eyes were turning red.
Red eyes-he began to wonder if he had malaria. He had a fever now,