Seventeen years ago

This article was in the news on MSN.com http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11752394/

It's about this woman who developed an "aggressive strep A" infection and was dead in three days. It's been a while since this was in the news and it got me thinking. It's been seventeen years since the first outbreak. My little brother was the third case. The whole thing was so very surreal. On Friday he stayed home from school with what seemed like a normal cold. Monday he was in the hospital with the left side of his face blown up like a balloon. Wednesday they told us they didn't know if they could do anything to stop it (they had already performed several surgeries and treated with every drug they could think of) -- that he would die if the infection made the tiny jump from his eye to his brain. It happened so fast. The doctors didn't know what to do. You grow up with this idea, you know, that once you get to the hospital the doctors know everything and, even if they can't fix it, at least they know about it. But this time they didn't know. I remember so clearly them coming in and being all professional and reassuring to my parents, then leaving the room. I went out shortly after and saw them in an empty room across the hall with a table with books spread all over it, open medical texts piled one on top of the other, and the doctors gathered around searching one book after another. It hit me then that they didn't know how to save him. I was six months pregnant with my first child, and at one point one of the doctors suddenly noticed my belly. He said, sort of off-handedly, that he wasn't sure I should be in the room, but it seemed to be more of a reflex than anything, and nothing more was said about it. I was there when my brother said goodbye to my mother. It's such a heartbreaking scene to remember, but at the time all I could think was how crazy the whole thing was, how impossible that my brother could die at 14. He didn't die. It came agonizingly close, but he pulled through. For the next two weeks they treated him in a hyperbaric chamber. I can't remember exactly why now. I think it was to increase the oxygen to the area of infection, or something. I just remember him lying in this glass tube, like Snow White. It took a long time, as the pressure had to be increased and decreased slowly, and we would sit in the room with him and watch movies on a TV mounted high on the wall and tilted so he could see it. Years later I saw a photo on a supermarket tabloid of Michael Jackson supposedly sleeping in a chamber just like the one my brother used, allegedly to keep him young. Anyway, he was lucky -- my brother, not Michael Jackson -- and he lost only the sight in his left eye. The scars from the surgery are hardly noticeable, and the whole thing passed into the family history of back-handed optimism where no bad thing is too improbable to happen to one of us, yet here we still are because, as always, it could have been so much worse. This is how we console ourselves in times of trial: we sit around the table and think of all the horrible things that could have happened but didn't. "It could have been worse." -- always the first words out of my parents' mouths, now the first out of mine. It's been said that the optimist sees the glass half full, the pessimist half empty, but there are also those who know the glass is half empty but are just happy it's not broken, or leaking, or re-possessed, or crushed under a falling roof-beam in an earthquake. My heart goes out to the family of the woman in that news story for the nightmare in which they've found themselves, and I am grateful once again that my brother got the chance to wake up from his.