She had called ahead to say that I needed immediate treatment. The nurses guarding the entrance to the emergency room did not seem to take me seriously, perhaps because I did not complain, perhaps because the friend who advocated for me, though a physician, was a black woman. I was in a condition known as sepsis death was close.

I had an abscess the size of a baseball in my liver, and the infection had spilled into my blood. Every so often I was seized by tremors.Īlthough I did not understand this then, I had a severe infection in my liver, which was leaking into my bloodstream. My head ached, my hands and feet tingled, I was coughing, and I could barely move. When I was admitted to the emergency room at midnight, I used the word malaise to describe my condition to the doctor. Another friend, a doctor, was waiting for me there. I had to use a wheelchair to get from the parking lot to the lobby of the emergency department. I struggled to get admitted to the emergency room in New Haven. I lay down flat as she sped to New Haven, because my head hurt less that way. Our friend had not known what was happening she looked at me in the wheelchair, said “What have they done?” in Polish, shook her head, and got me into the front seat. As she remembers the journey, “You were fading from life on the flight.” At the Hartford airport she wheeled me from the plane straight to a friend’s car and then stayed with the kids to wait for the luggage. Marci arranged for wheelchairs at the airports and got us where we needed to be.Īt the Fort Myers airport I sat in a wheelchair with the children on a curb while she returned the rental car. I had to lie down to rest after brushing my teeth and after putting on each article of clothing. On the morning of the twenty-eighth, she packed everything up and got our two kids ready to go. But it was my wife, Marci, who had to make the decisions and do the work. I had not been satisfied with treatment in Florida, and I wanted to be home. On December 27, we decided to return to New Haven. Then I began to feel worse, with a headache and growing fatigue. In Florida on vacation, on December 23, I was admitted to the hospital for tingling and numbness in my hands and feet but released the following day. In Connecticut, on December 15, I was admitted to the hospital for an appendectomy and released after less than twenty-four hours.

Late at night in Munich on December 3, 2019, I was admitted to a hospital with abdominal pain and then released the next morning. Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Imagesįirst responders at the Riverside University Health Systems Medical Center, Moreno Valley, California, May 15, 2020

The road to freedom timothy snyder