Some heal themselves, in due time.
Others, like my Ricky, drag out the years in pain, debility, and sorrow. Fits of fever seize them. They take to their beds for days, for weeks, for months—racked and suffering and exhausted, sick at their stomachs, sick in their heads. The gram-negative bacterium is (they say) neurotoxic. It inflames the ganglia of the brain. The patient may expect not merely fever and pains, but constant anxiety, causeless fears, a collapse of the calmest temper, hysterias, heebie-jeebies, screaming meemies, spasms, and incomprehensible alarms.
You must try to ignore it, Mrs. Wylie. Personality changes occur owing merely to the nature of your disease. Devote your (changed) self to a consideration of the change as physical phenomenology. You are lucky to get your trouble diagnosed. Hundreds of thousands of undulant fever sufferers spend their lives running from one doctor to another without avail. They're told they have tuberculosis, intestinal poisoning, brain tumor, neurasthenia, and bad dispositions. Medicine is—though the fact's not medicine's fault—very laggard about recognizing this common malady. Consider yourself lucky.
Ricky threw into the tormented years her fortitude. She said she was fortunate. They knew the name of her ailment and they were doing all they could.
Hospitals and clinics, X rays and tests, sulfas and antibiotics, vaccines and sterile sores—a little improvement, a red-hot localization and the hospital again. Coming fine! Another year or two and you should feel—pretty much your old self. Patience. Courage.
Well. She had plenty.
The doctors—the dozens, the scores, mauled and mangled and encouraged.
We have great hope for this new immunizing serum.
She took it.
Stubborn case, Mrs. Wylie. You seem to be especially sensitive to brucella.