The Dallas Ebola incident reminded me of an evening I spent with my friend Cole Smithey, the film critic.
“My finger is bothering me,” Cole whispered to me during a screening. After the lights came up, he showed me an index finger that had expanded to nearly double its normal width. We drew the same conclusion: an insect bite, most likely a spider. Swelling tends to be greater on extremities.
As the night wore on, however, the swelling got worse and more painful. We searched in vain for the telltale double marks of a spider bite.
Cole is a stoic guy but his agony was obvious. Around 11 p.m. we appeared at the emergency room of Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan — a stone’s throw from New York Hospital where, New Yorkers remember, Andy Warhol died of medical neglect.
We waited. The pain got worse. When we consulted the triage nurse, she took a quick look at Cole’s hand, which by then was swollen nearly down to his wrist, and told us to leave.
“Go the pharmacy and get some Benadryl,” she ordered.
We followed her advice. Cole took the Benadryl and went home. And nearly died. Turned out he had an aggressive form of flesh-eating bacteria.
Unable to sleep, he took a cab at 5 a.m. to a private 24-hour clinic where doctors immediately recognized the symptoms and began pumping heavy-duty antibiotics intravenously. It was touch and go for a few hours.
“Good thing you came when you did,” a doctor told him. “If you’d waited a couple more hours, you’d be dead.”
