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just did!” And they laugh, and that breaks the tension.
    Next stop Calcutta, after twenty-four hours in flight. One hundred degrees, one hundred percent humidity. I get off the plane, and I’m met by my own personal private security detail of nuns. They whisk me through customs and deliver me directly to the hospital where the doctors are waiting for me, and the doctors intone, “She’s deteriorating.”
    I go directly to her room. I’m meeting Mother Teresa for the first time. She’s clearly very weak, and she beckons me towards her, and I feel as if I’m about to get a blessing.
    She says the following: “Thank you for coming. I will never leave Calcutta. Do not ever disagree with my Indian doctors. I need them. They run my hospitals and clinics, and I will not have them embarrassed.” And with that she dismisses me with a wave of her hand.
    I go and wash my hands, and I come back to examine her. As I go to pull her gown down to listen to her heart and lungs, the nuns who surround her lift the gown up. I pull the gown down; they pull the gown up. This Kabuki dance goes on for several minutes until, from sheer exhaustion, I just banish them from the room. After I perform my examination, I still don’t know what’s wrong with her. So I do what an infectious disease doctor does: I do my cultures and my Gram stains and my buffycoat smears and my Tzanck prep. And we agree we’ll meet the next morning at 9 A.M .
    As I leave the hospital, I set upon five thousand pilgrims who are holding a candlelit prayer vigil. I escape back to the hotel, where I pour myself a stiff drink, order room service for dinner, and turn on the local news hoping it will serve as a distraction.
    And there I am.
    The lead story on the evening news, that night and every night, footage of “Dr. Lombardi entering and leaving the hospital,” with the reporters saying, “Dr. Lombardi’s come from the United States to attend to Mother Teresa as she inches closer towards death.” The drumbeat of the death watch had begun.
    She deteriorates over the next forty-eight hours; she’s in septic shock.
The rude unhinging of the machinery of life
as it was described 150 years ago, as apt a description now. And on the third day, two propitious events collide. The first is the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen: small, tiny translucent dew drops on the blood culture plate. This is important. This could be a bacterial infection. This is an important clue. The second is one of the pope’s cardiologists flies in from Rome. He’s an impressive man, straight from central casting: a head of silver hair, a Brioni suit, Hermès tie, Gucci loafers. And at our first meeting, when I tell the group of doctors excitedly that the cultures are turning positive, and we may have an answer here, and my concern is that a pacemaker that was put in several months before could be the cause of the infection, he erupts Vesuvius-ly.
    “Out of the question!” he bellows. “This is a clear case of malaria.” Well if they could diagnose malaria anywhere, itwould be on the subcontinent of India, and this wasn’t the case.
    She worsens over the next couple of days, and I’m having dreams where she’s actually falling just beyond my outstretched hand. And I change my routine; rather than fleeing the hospital at the end of the day through the side exit, I go out through the front, and I walk through the pilgrims, and I’m bolstered by their love and their devotion.
    On the fifth day I make my most impassioned plea. I stand before the group, and I tell them that this is septic shock. It has a bacterial cause, and it’s due to the pacemaker. This pacemaker must be removed. Dr. Brioni (as I’ve come to call him) stands at the lectern carrying his copy of
The Merck Manual
. It’s a small book that many doctors carry; he has the Italian version [
in an Italian accent
]
Merka Manuale
. And in a scene right out of Shakespeare, as he talks he’s pounding the lectern with his