Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome Read Free Page B

connections. That was another thing we didn’t know a virus could really do.
    In the lab we would talk about this virus like it was an evil genius. Like it was a Bond villain. It was a joke, and a way to have a little bit of levity in an otherwise depressing race against time. But in some ways it wasn’t a joke at all. I think the general thought around the CDC was that this virus was actually the closest thing to malicious that a virus could get.
    Monique Davis:
    You could see how the second phase of the virus was working in our patients, the ones that were conscious, anyway. It would be like a series of little strokes. A little aphasia here, some loss of hearing or sight there, someone having a bit of Bell’s Palsy over on the next bed. Sometimes the patient would snap back immediately—the brain rewiring itself on the fly, I guess—and sometimes they’d just get worse. Some of them didn’t progress, they just died. I had one patient stop talking to me mid-sentence. It took me a minute to realize she had passed. I honestly thought she had paused to collect her thoughts.
    With the meningitis phase a lot of what we were doing, to be entirely upfront about it, was keeping the patients as comfortable as we could while we waited out whatever the virus was doing to their brain. A lot of people we couldn’t help, and their bodies just sort of let go. Most survived and most of them seemed to recover all right, with lesser or greater short-term cognitive shortfalls that were eventually addressed with therapies similar to what stroke victims get after an incident. Some experienced permanent brain damage, again to a greater or lesser extent—there was no way to tell how bad it was going to be until it was over.
    And then there were the people who experienced Lock In.

PART TWO: HADEN’S SYNDROME
    Neal Joseph, Biographer and Author of “The President’s Crucible: The First Year of Haden’s Syndrome”:
    I talked to David Haden, President Haden’s younger brother, and the thing he told me that stuck in my head was that the President absolutely hated when the disease started being called “Haden’s syndrome.” Absolutely
hated
it. David said, and I remember this clearly, that it was, “Not because it reminded everyone that he was President when it hit. It was because it was named for Margie. He hated that from the minute it stuck until the end of time, everyone would think of Margie as being sick. Of being trapped in her own self. As being the person you thought of, when you thought of Haden’s syndrome. Ben married this wonderful, physical, healthy, gorgeous woman and no one but him would ever think of her that way again.”
    Janis Massey, Chief of Staff for Margaret Haden, First Lady of the United States of America:
    After Margie got sick we looked at her schedule to see when it might have happened, when that first contact with the virus might have been. After ten minutes we threw up our hands. The First Lady’s schedule for the couple of weeks before she got sick had her at six events a day across five time zones in two different countries. One of those days she came into contact with school children, hospital patients, and the Prime Minister of Canada within six hours of each other. The only people who come into contact with more people on a daily basis than the First Lady are toll booth operators.
    She could have gotten it from any of the people she met. She could have gotten it from us, her staff; some of us got sick around the same time and at one point half of us were out of the office with it. She could have gotten it from Ben’s staff, many of whom also got sick. It was impossible to pinpoint. Which makes Margie like nearly everyone else who got sick with the virus.
    Col. Lydia Harvey, MD (Ret.), Physician to the President:
    The First Lady came to see me on the afternoon of the 13th, after a staff meeting, and said she was feeling achy and wanted to know if I could do anything about it. As I examined her we