Grrrr. Word Count: 7018
I had thought that writing about Patient Zero would be pretty fun, but it turns out that Patient One is much more interesting. Patient Zero came and went pretty quickly (bit someone at the Baker County Fair in Oregon, got shot up by some gun-toting fairgoers, and that’s all she wrote.) Patient One, however, well, it’s a bit of a sadder story (which I haven’t even finished yet!)
Surprisingly, it didn’t hit Oregon again for a while. You’d think that you’d be able to pull out a map of Baker County, plot all the outbreak locations and you’d see a huge mass of red dots reaching out from the fairgrounds as the virus spread. The next documented case was on the other side of the world, almost exactly: Ghanzi, Botswana. A 32-year-old woman named Mosetsanagape Basadi had been complaining of flu-like symptoms: aches, nausea, fever. The usual shit. Nobody thought anything of it. Turns out, that’s Stage I.
Stage II isn’t much more on the surface, really. It only differentiates itself from Stage I by the addition of a runny nose. Yeah, it’s a severely runny nose, one that doesn’t ever seem to stop, but a little Day-Quil and some tissue, and you’re still not all that concerned. It took a while before people realized this was something to get worried about. The scientists, they likened Stage II to the idea of rats streaming off a sinking ship. When your nose starts running and it just won’t stop? That’s the beginning of all your bodily fluids trying to get the fuck out. Westphail is so fucking scary even your snot doesn’t want to stick around. It was towards the end of her Stage II that Basadi decided it might be more than just a severe head cold that she was experiencing and headed down the A3 road towards the airport and spoke with a nurse at Ghanzi Primary Hospital. She was admitted, and cared for as if it was just a run-of-the-mill, albeit severe, flu. Three days later, when all the mucous had left her body, Basadi progressed to Stage III.
If you think seeing all the mucous go is scary, imagine when the blood starts following. It starts as a trickle: just a bloody nose to follow days of the worst runny nose on record. And then, man oh man, it just starts to flow. The doctors at Ghanzi Primary threw up their hands in defeat, loaded Basadi into the back of an ambulance and drove her 400 miles up the A2 to Princess Marina Hospital in Gaborone. The docs there didn’t fare much better than they did down in Ghanzi. To be fair, nobody did very well with it at first, and the eight hours it took for Basadi to make the trip more or less was all it took for Stage III to turn into Stage IV.
At first, before the Gooseman-Keane act was passed, the end of Stage III was considered the end of life. Once all the blood is gone, yeah, people are pretty much dead. But that does discredit to Westphail’s Stage IV, the mack daddy stage of all viruses everywhere. Ebola can’t hold a candle to it. HIV trembles in fear at the mention of its name. During Stage IV, the virus, having evacuated all fluid from what is now little more than the husk of a former human being, having basically terraformed the body to suit its own dark little needs, Westphail invades the brain and, like Hitler did in Europe, Westphail takes the fuck over.
Now, like all good invasions, Westphail takes a minute or two to complete its occupation. When Basadi arrived at Princess Marina, she was pronounced DOA. Her mother, who had made the trip with her, wept and wrung her hands and made preparations to bring her daughter’s body back to Ghanzi for burial. It’s a lot easier to transport a dying person than a dead body in Botswana; the only viable option was to go by train to Lobatse where a cousin who had an old pickup truck would meet her to take her the rest of the way home. The arrangements took some time; the next train to Lobatse wasn’t for another two days. The staff at Princess Marina allowed Leonor Basadi to stay in an unused room in the hospital, the kindness of their hearts bolstered by a general fear of allowing this woman who may have been exposed to what they were calling “Sweggrootgriep†— which pretty much translates to “Big Bad Flu†— to leave the hospital and potentially infect the rest of the town.