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

so certainly he had some kind of infection. The backache had spread until
all the muscles in his body ached badly. He started taking malaria pills,
but they didn't do any good, so he asked one of the nurses to give him an
injection of an antimalarial drug.
The nurse gave it to him in the muscle of his arm. The pain of the
injection was very, very bad. He had never felt such pain from a shot; it
was abnormal and memorable. He wondered why a simple shot would give him
this kind of pain. Then he developed abdominal pain, and that made him
think that he might have typhoid fever, so he gave himself a course of


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antibiotic pills, but that had no effect on his illness. Meanwhile, his
patients needed him, and he continued to work at the hospital. The pain
in his stomach and in his muscles grew unbearable, and he developed
jaundice.
Unable to diagnose himself, in severe pain, and unable to continue
with his work, he presented himself to Dr. Antonia Bagshawe, a physician
at Nairobi Hospital. She examined him, observed his fever, his red eyes,
his jaundice, his abdominal pain, and came up with nothing definite, but
wondered if he had gallstones or a liver abscess. A gall-bladder attack
or a liver abscess could cause fever and jaundice and abdominal pain-the
red eyes she could not explain-and she ordered an ultrasound examination
of his liver. She studied the images of his liver and saw that it was
enlarged, but, other than that, she could see nothing unusual. By this
time, he was very sick, and they put him in a private room with nurses
attending him around the clock. His face set itself into an
expressionless mask.
This possible gallstone attack could be fatal. Dr. Bagshawe
recommended that Dr. Musoke have exploratory surgery. He was opened up in
the main operating theater at Nairobi Hospital by a team of surgeons
headed by Dr. Imre Lofler. They made an incision over his liver and
pulled back the abdominal muscles. What they found inside Musoke was
eerie and disturbing, and they could not explain it. His liver was
swollen and red and did not look healthy, but they could not find any sign
of gallstones. Meanwhile, he would not stop bleeding. Any surgical
procedure will cut through blood vessels, and the cut vessels will ooze
for a while and then clot up, or if the oozing continues, the surgeon will
put dabs of gel foam on them to stop the bleeding. Musoke's blood vessels
would not stop oozing-his blood would not clot. It was as if he had
become a hemophiliac. They dabbed gel foam all over his liver, and the
blood cam through the foam. He leaked blood like a sponge. They had to
suction off a lot of blood, but as they pumped it out, the incision filled
up again. It was like digging a hole below the water table; it fills up
as fast as you pump it out. One of the surgeons would later tell people
that the team had been "up to the elbows in blood". They cut a wedge out
of his liver-a liver biopsy-and dropped the wedge into a bottle of
pickling fluid and closed up Musoke as quickly as they could.