The Moth (4 page)

I try to give him the essential data. I’m living in London Fields, and he tells me I’ve moved onto the block he lived on when he was nineteen and squatting in London. Out of the whole city of London. And he recognizes the names of all the locals I can rattle off. And by the end of the conversation he’s saying, “I’m coming with you back to London aren’t I?”

And I’m thinking,
Are you out of your mind?
I mean, what woman in her right mind is going to let this lunatic come back to London with her? There is no way.

About a year later, we’re married. Our rings, which were made by a friend of ours, are stamped with the lyrics “Melody and Number, Shapes and Rhythms” with no small dose of irony and defiance. About a year after that, we’re having a baby, and we’re laughing at how improbable this kid is.

We have no idea. When this kid is born, he is so beautiful, and afterwards a young medical resident comes charging into my hospital room, and he’s so excited he’s beaming. And I’m thinking,
He sees how beautiful this boy is
. But he’s carrying an X-ray, which he slaps on the window of my hospital room so the light can come through, and I can see it better. But I still don’t know what I’m looking at.

He says, “Your son’s heart is on the right side.” And he
doesn’t mean the correct side, he doesn’t mean the left side. He means my son’s heart is on the
right
side.

And all I can think in this terrifying moment is
Get Warren
.

And the resident says, “Your son has dextrocardia with situs inversus; all his organs are on the opposite side.”

And I say, “Get Warren.”

And the resident tells me he’s so excited, because he never thought he’d ever see anything like this. To his knowledge, nobody else in the hospital’s seen it in real life. And he’s describing studies for me that are made up of only twelve cases because the numbers are so rare.

And then Warren’s there, and he’s saying in that rough, raw, beautiful accent what only he can convince me of, the totally impossible. He’s saying, “He’s perfect.”

And our now eight-year-old son is a perfectly formed mirror image of the more conventional human anatomy, a very rare and unlikely alignment. It’s as though Warren and I took our left-handed code on a Möbius strip around the universe and brought back this right-handed boy. And that boy, as intense and spirited as his father, is like a living testament to the incredibly improbable trip that we’re on.

Janna Levin
is an astrophysicist and writer. She has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and chaotic spacetimes. Her second book, a novel,
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
, won the PEN/Bingham prize and was runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway. She is the author of the popular science book
How the Universe Got Its Spots
. Janna is a professor at Barnard College of Columbia University and was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow (2012).

DR. GEORGE LOMBARDI

I
t was a Saturday afternoon in September 1989, and I was home alone unpacking boxes when the phone rang, and a woman that I did not know started to interrogate me.

“Are you Dr. Lombardi? Are you Dr. George Lombardi? Are you an infectious disease specialist? Did you live and work and do research in East Africa? Are you considered to be an expert in tropical infections? Would you consider yourself to be an expert in viral hemorrhagic fevers?”

At this point I paused, gathered myself, and asked the obvious question, “Who are you?”

She introduced herself and said she was the representative of a world figure and Nobel laureate, someone who was suspected of having a viral hemorrhagic fever, and she was calling to ask if I would consult on the case.

Now I found this highly improbable. I was thirty-two years old. I had just opened my office. The phone never rang. I had no patients. In fact I remember staring at the phone trying to will it to ring. But she persisted, and she mentioned that she had gotten my name from a colleague of mine who had told her to
“call Dr. Lombardi. He knows a lot about very weird things.” She arranged a conference call, and in ten minutes I was transported through the telephone wires to a small hospital in Calcutta, India, where I found out for the first time that the patient was Mother Teresa.

On the line were her two main Indian doctors. We chatted and discussed the details of the case for about an hour, and though those details are now hazy to me, what came through the staticky wires was their deep abiding concern for their patient—these guys were worried.

I wished them well as I got off the line, and I went back to unpack some boxes. She called again an hour later. She said, “They were very impressed by what you had to say, and they’d like you to go to Calcutta. I’m making the arrangements. I can get you out tomorrow afternoon on the Concorde for the first leg.”

I said, “This is impossible,” as I had just found my passport in one of these boxes, and I told her it expired three months before.

She said, “That’s a minor detail. Meet me in front of your building tomorrow morning, Sunday, at 7
A.M
.”

Well as you can probably surmise, I’m somebody who pretty much does what he’s told. So seven o’clock the next morning she comes careening down the block in a wood-paneled station wagon with bad shock absorbers. I jump in. The next stop’s the passport office at Rockefeller Center, where on a Sunday morning a State Department official came, let us in, took my picture, and in fifteen minutes handed me a brand-new passport. The next stop was the Indian Consulate, where, again on a Sunday morning, the entire staff came in full dress uniform to give me an honor guard procession, which I walked past as they ushered
me in to the consulate general himself, who affixed the visa to my passport.

He leaned in towards me and said, “We bestow our blessings on you. The eyes of the world are upon you.”

Now I knew who Mother Teresa was, of course, but this was the first moment I realized what she meant, not just to the Indian people, but to the world.

I get back in the car. I’m getting into this.

“Where next?”

She says, “We’re ahead of schedule. I’m going to drop you off at your home; I’ll be back at 11
A.M
. I’ll meet you downstairs.” Sure enough, 11
A.M.
, tires squealing, she pulls up with one addition: in the backseat of this station wagon are wedged five Sisters of Charity—five nuns—as if sitting on a perch. They start handing me letters in envelopes and small packages wrapped in burlap and tied with twine, saying, “Well if you see Sister Narita and Sister Rafael, please give them this from me.” I’m a courier. This is all before Homeland Security.

We barrel off to JFK, and when we get there I ask, sotto voce, “Why are they here? They could have just given you these things. I don’t understand why they had to come to the airport.”

And I was told, “Well, I didn’t know how to tell you this, but you don’t have a confirmed seat on the Concorde—you’re flying standby.” My eyes widened. “Well, the sisters are going to go up and down the line of ticketed passengers and beg until someone gives up their seat.” I stood off to the side, just out of earshot, as I watched the scene unfold.

The five nuns surround this first New York City businessman. He’s listening to them, he’s looking over at me, he’s looking back at them, he shakes his head no, he’s sorry, he can’t help. They move on to the next one. And now I can hear their
voices, which obviously have been raised, and in about fifteen seconds this businessman realizes that resistance is futile, and he hands over his ticket. The sisters come towards me, and they hand me this ticket as an offering, and there is a small triumphal grin on each of their faces—the nun equivalent of a high five.

I wag my finger at them. I say, “You sisters are little devils! I’m going to tell Mother Teresa what you just did!” And they laugh, and that breaks the tension.

Next stop Calcutta, after twenty-four hours in flight. One hundred degrees, one hundred percent humidity. I get off the plane, and I’m met by my own personal private security detail of nuns. They whisk me through customs and deliver me directly to the hospital where the doctors are waiting for me, and the doctors intone, “She’s deteriorating.”

I go directly to her room. I’m meeting Mother Teresa for the first time. She’s clearly very weak, and she beckons me towards her, and I feel as if I’m about to get a blessing.

She says the following: “Thank you for coming. I will never leave Calcutta. Do not ever disagree with my Indian doctors. I need them. They run my hospitals and clinics, and I will not have them embarrassed.” And with that she dismisses me with a wave of her hand.

I go and wash my hands, and I come back to examine her. As I go to pull her gown down to listen to her heart and lungs, the nuns who surround her lift the gown up. I pull the gown down; they pull the gown up. This Kabuki dance goes on for several minutes until, from sheer exhaustion, I just banish them from the room. After I perform my examination, I still don’t know what’s wrong with her. So I do what an infectious disease doctor does: I do my cultures and my Gram stains and my buffy
coat smears and my Tzanck prep. And we agree we’ll meet the next morning at 9
A.M
.

As I leave the hospital, I set upon five thousand pilgrims who are holding a candlelit prayer vigil. I escape back to the hotel, where I pour myself a stiff drink, order room service for dinner, and turn on the local news hoping it will serve as a distraction.

And there I am.

The lead story on the evening news, that night and every night, footage of “Dr. Lombardi entering and leaving the hospital,” with the reporters saying, “Dr. Lombardi’s come from the United States to attend to Mother Teresa as she inches closer towards death.” The drumbeat of the death watch had begun.

She deteriorates over the next forty-eight hours; she’s in septic shock.
The rude unhinging of the machinery of life
as it was described 150 years ago, as apt a description now. And on the third day, two propitious events collide. The first is the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen: small, tiny translucent dew drops on the blood culture plate. This is important. This could be a bacterial infection. This is an important clue. The second is one of the pope’s cardiologists flies in from Rome. He’s an impressive man, straight from central casting: a head of silver hair, a Brioni suit, Hermès tie, Gucci loafers. And at our first meeting, when I tell the group of doctors excitedly that the cultures are turning positive, and we may have an answer here, and my concern is that a pacemaker that was put in several months before could be the cause of the infection, he erupts Vesuvius-ly.

“Out of the question!” he bellows. “This is a clear case of malaria.” Well if they could diagnose malaria anywhere, it
would be on the subcontinent of India, and this wasn’t the case.

She worsens over the next couple of days, and I’m having dreams where she’s actually falling just beyond my outstretched hand. And I change my routine; rather than fleeing the hospital at the end of the day through the side exit, I go out through the front, and I walk through the pilgrims, and I’m bolstered by their love and their devotion.

On the fifth day I make my most impassioned plea. I stand before the group, and I tell them that this is septic shock. It has a bacterial cause, and it’s due to the pacemaker. This pacemaker must be removed. Dr. Brioni (as I’ve come to call him) stands at the lectern carrying his copy of
The Merck Manual
. It’s a small book that many doctors carry; he has the Italian version [
in an Italian accent
]
Merka Manuale
. And in a scene right out of Shakespeare, as he talks he’s pounding the lectern with his book, “If you listen”
Boom! Boom! Boom!
“to this American upstart,”
Boom!
“I will not be held responsible!”
BOOM!

The sounds ricocheted through the somber conference room like gunshots, and in that moment I looked into the eyes of the courtly, elegant Indian doctors, and they had lost respect for him. They asked us to wait outside as they considered their options. I sat there with my vinyl knapsack and my socks with sandals. He sat next to me elegantly attired with two equally elegantly attired attachées from the Italian Consulate. They called us back in and said, “We’ve decided to go with Dr. Lombardi.” The pope’s doctor silently packed his bag, left the hospital, went directly to the airport, and flew out of the country.

I said, “Let’s get that pacemaker out.”

And they looked at me and said, “You want it out, you have to take it out.”

I said, “I’ve never done that before.” They gave me this wonderful nonverbal Bengali head waddle.

So I went down to her room. I banished the nuns. I got a charge nurse and a basic tray, and I prepared the patient. The pacemaker box came out readily, but the wire, the wire that had been sitting in her right ventricle for several months, was tethered into place, and it would not budge. I twisted and turned and did all kinds of little body English. This thing was stuck. I started to sweat, my glasses fogged over. There had been stories that if you pull hard enough you can put a hole in the ventricle, and she could bleed into her chest and die within a matter of minutes.

So in the most surreal moment, I said a prayer
to
Mother Teresa
for
Mother Teresa, and the catheter came loose.

I took it out, I cultured the tip, and I proved that this pacemaker was the cause of her infection. She got better. Her fever broke. She woke up. A couple of days later she was sitting in a chair eating.

My work was done, but they wouldn’t let me leave. I stayed another two weeks as I was the only doctor who could start her IVs, who could thread those catheters into those tiny, fragile elderly woman’s veins. It’s a skill I had picked up in the mid-1970s as a medical student at NYU Bellevue Hospital, where I learned to start IVs in the hardened veins of IV drug addicts. It’s a skill I honestly thought I would never ever need again. When it was my time to leave, they held a press conference and they publicly thanked me, and that’s why I’m able to tell this story. I flew back to my life and to my two sons.