the Society

September 3rd

We had a young girl brought in today, no more than nine years old. She was running a fever – a dangerous thing in a world with no antibiotics, no antivirals, and limited food and water. I brought her in in my arms – taking advantage of the fact that she's still young enough to be carried this way. Besides that, despite her alert state of consciousness, I didn't want to make the girl walk; she was weakened already by the fever. I laid her down on one of the beds in my rooms, having decided that she will be safer in quarantine, as will the rest of us.

Her fever has gone down since she got here, but it is always worrying when someone falls ill without a known cause, and is so possibly contagious. When I checked her before, she was wheezing in her sleep, but at least she had gotten to sleep and could devote more of her energy to fighting whatever infection had infiltrated her small form. I sat on the floor beside the bed then, brushing her dark hair back from her forehead, willing the fever to break.

I've learned to consider the lack of vital medications here realistically over the years, but learning to do medicine without all of the equipment one would usually find in a hospital – when they still existed – has proven more difficult, especially in the first years. Now, in this world, I think doctors, myself included, took those machines for granted; if one wanted to diagnose a brain tumour or arthritis, the diagnosis wouldn't even be considered until an MRI or X-Ray scan showed the damage in front of our eyes. Now, though, determining the cause of an infection must wait much longer, until the symptoms present themselves readily and aggressively enough to allow one to distinguish and treat it – that is, if treatment is at all possible.

I think of the girl, named Nell, still lying in her bed in the next room, sleepily wrapping herself in blankets despite her fever. I feel the urge to check her again, even though there is not much I can do until her fever breaks, or she gets worse. I will her to get better on her own, but I know that this isn't a certainty, not here.

Sometimes, in the old world, patients died, and often, there was nothing more you could have done. Sometimes, even everything that modern medicine had to offer was not enough to keep someone alive. As doctors, we were taught to treat death as it was then, a personal loss for the family, and an unfortunate but usually inescapable occurrence. During my residency, I remember that my seniors handled death with such deft emotional calculation that I sometimes believed that they felt as much pain as the family members to whom they had delivered the news. Perhaps they did experience such feelings. Personally, I, too, had to learn to handle death in a concise and neat way, giving the family the facts as I knew them; I would rather be honest than perpetuate their suffering. Besides, I never believed in platitudes, even before I went to medical school. Here, though, death feels different. Here, the death of even one feels like a significant percentage of the known population – no longer just a personal loss for the family, but a loss for our very concept of survival.

When I was young, I used to explore the suburban parks near my childhood home with my best friend – a blonde Labrador retriever my father had so affectionately named Turtle. At that time, I hadn't a care in my known world; I knew only the people in my elementary school, Turtle's favourite tennis ball in the world – which was strange to me then because I could never tell the difference between two tennis balls, let alone every tennis ball in the world – and what I would have for dinner when I got home. I wondered just before, as I organised the bedding around Nell, if she remembers anything before the wars, and I wonder now what it would be like to have grown up in a world that has already ended.