Sitting at his desk, Michael sipped a lukewarm cup of coffee and reflected upon the story he’d heard earlier. The idea of a lost tribe was unbelievable, of course, but the tattooed native might be proof such a tribe existed . . . if he had told Esma the truth. If he had been babbling in the delirium of fever, it was far more likely he had merely recited stories from his childhood, tales as old as the Amazon itself.
Interesting, though, that he had spoken of a shuddering disease. Michael suspected he meant chills; the man had been febrile and dehydrated when admitted, so he had been experiencing chills. But they would have begun hours after the patient suffered the spear attack, and Ya-ree had told Esma he suffered from the shuddering disease some time ago.
Perhaps he was mistaken. Perhaps Esma misunderstood. After all, she had been translating a language she did not speak.
Michael sat the cup on his desk and folded his hands, staring at nothing. The office around him was heavy with after-hours quiet, but the dark skies outside had opened up. The rataplan of rain on the roof usually soothed him, but tonight the pounding rain spoke of drums in faraway villages.
What about the man’s odd tattoos? They had been significant enough to frighten one of the orderlies past the point of embarrassment. And though Esma was a kind woman with more than her fair share of compassion, Michael doubted she would have spent the entire day by the bedside of a tattooed Iquitos merchant with a strange tale to tell. Something about the native seemed to either entice or repel everyone he encountered.
Curious, Michael swiveled to face his computer, clicked away from the medical database he’d been using earlier, and navigated his way into a powerful search engine. When the search box opened, he typed shuddering disease, then clicked the enter key.
He tapped his nails on the desk until the results came up: nothing.
Rethinking his approach, he tried again with trembling disease.
After a long moment, a long list of links filled the screen. The first led to a listing from a medical dictionary: kuru, the trembling disease.
He read on to discover that kuru had been reported only among members of the Fore tribe in New Guinea. The disease involved a progressive degeneration of the central nervous system, particularly in the region of the brain responsible for control of the trunk, limbs, and head. Kuru affected mainly women and children and usually proved fatal within nine to twelve months. The condition was thought to be caused by prions and transmitted by cannibalism.
But Michael wasn’t in New Guinea . . . and his patient had walked out of the jungle, which would be impossible with a disabled central nervous system.
Dismissing the idea of kuru, he clicked on the next entry in the list. The link brought up a personal experience essay by a man with Parkinson’s. That disease also caused shivering and uncontrollable shuddering, so perhaps Ya-ree had suffered from Parkinson’s . . .
No. Michael scratched his chin, acknowledging the obvious. He had not seen his patient twitch at all, and Parkinson’s was incurable. Yet Ya-ree had said the shaman cured him.
He clicked back to the search results page and noted several other entries for kuru and another about a Chinese cure for a trembling disease often found in “hairy crabs.”
He rolled his eyes as he closed out the screen. If Ya-ree had not had Parkinson’s, he could have had some other weakness of the central nervous system . . . maybe some unknown condition, or something like dengue fever, which certainly left most patients longing for death. Perhaps the man had suffered from chills and fever many years before, and the shaman of the second village cured him—or the virus simply ran its course. A simpleminded native might have believed himself cured of a shuddering disease.
Impossible to know for certain, really . . . unless the man’s tissues could be examined postmortem.
Michael pressed his lips together. The hospital did not usually perform autopsies on indigent patients who wandered out of the jungle, but it appeared there would be no family to protest. Burials in the tropics were usually accomplished with great haste, so he’d have to put a note in the patient’s record if he wanted to examine the body after the man expired.
Sighing, he wrote up an autopsy order, then stood to walk down the hall and attach it to his patient’s chart.