[...]... from the base of the spine Cerebrospinal fluid is a clear, watery substance that runs along the surface of the spinal cord and coats the brain, cushioning it from impacts A normal, healthy human body produces about a pint of it a day, and any diminishment in the clarity of the fluid indicates that an infection or hemorrhage has occurred Such an infection is called meningitis: the swelling of the meninges,... gram-negative or gram-positive) came back indicating gram-negative rods—which was highly unusual Meanwhile a computerized tomography (CT) scan of my head showed that the meningeal lining of my brain was dangerously swollen and inflamed A breathing tube was put into my trachea, allowing a ventilator to take over the job of breathing for me—twelve breaths a minute, exactly—and a battery of monitors was... than all of them Without using any words, she spoke to me The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this: “You are loved and... revealed that the bacteria living in the man’s large intestine had acquired the KPC gene by direct plasmid transfer from his resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae infection In other words, his body had provided the laboratory for the creation of a species of bacteria that, if it got into the general population, might rival the Black Death, a plague that killed off half of Europe in the fourteenth century The. .. the adjacent labs, they considered all of the diagnostic possibilities and therapeutic options Minute by minute, as the test results came back, I continued to groan and squirm beneath the straps on my gurney An ever more baffling picture was emerging The Gram’s stain (a chemical test, named after a Danish physician who invented the method, that allows doctors to classify an invading bacteria as either... surrounds the more primitive sections of the brain The cortex is responsible for memory, language, emotion, visual and auditory awareness, and logic So when an organism like E coli attacks the brain, the initial damage is to the areas that perform the functions most crucial to maintaining our human qualities Many victims of bacterial meningitis die in the first several days of their illness Of those who arrive... Could I have somehow picked up an antibiotic -proof KPC-harboring bacteria while I was over in Israel? It was unlikely But it was a possible explanation for the apparent resistance of my infection, and my doctors went to work to determine if that was indeed the bacteria that was attacking my brain My case was about to become, for the first of many reasons, a part of medical history 9 The Core Meanwhile,... had wanted to The knowledge of all this came so early that it was simply a part of who I was, as accepted and unquestioned as the jet black color of my hair and the fact that I liked hamburgers and disliked cauliflower I loved my adoptive parents just as much as I would have if they had been true blood relations, and they clearly felt the same about me My older sister, Jean, had also been adopted, but... distant yet strong, so that each pulse of it goes right through you Like a heartbeat? A little, but darker, more mechanical—like the sound of metal against metal, as if a giant, subterranean blacksmith is pounding an anvil somewhere off in the distance: pounding it so hard that the sound vibrates through the earth, or the mud, or wherever it is that you are I didn’t have a body—not one that I was aware... coming back to the States in early 1946, Dad went on to finish his neurosurgical training with his friend and Harvard Medical School classmate, Donald Matson, who had served in the European Theater They trained at the Peter Bent Brigham and the Children’s Hospitals in Boston (flagship hospitals of Harvard Medical School) under Dr Franc D Ingraham, who had been one of the last residents trained by Dr Harvey . is about the events that changed my mind on the matter. They convinced me that, as marvelous a mechanism as the brain is, it was not my brain that saved my life that day at all. What sprang into. surface of the spinal cord and coats the brain, cushioning it from impacts. A normal, healthy human body produces about a pint of it a day, and any diminishment in the clarity of the fluid indicates. groaning and flailing my arms and legs. It was obvious to Dr. Potter from the way I was raving and writhing around that my brain was under heavy attack. A nurse brought over a crash cart, another