Loading summary
Transcript7 lines
- [00:00]
Sponsor Representative
This is a message from sponsor Intuit. TurboTax Taxes was waiting and wondering and worrying if you were going to get any money back and then waiting, wondering and worrying some more. Now Taxes is matching with a TurboTax expert who can do your taxes as soon as today. An expert who gives your taxes their undivided attention as they work on your return while you get real time updates on their progress so you can focus on your day. An expert who will find you every deduction possible and file every form, every investment, Every everything with 100% accuracy all so you can get the most money back guaranteed. No waiting, no wondering, no worries. Now this is Taxes. Get an Expert now on TurboTax.com only available with TurboTax Live full service real time updates only in iOS mobile app. See guarantee details@turbotax.com guarantees as we approach the end of the year, I'm thinking about the next Next year is the year I finally make my Spanish better than my 9 year olds. Rosetta Stone is the most trusted language learning program available on desktop or as an app and it truly immerses you in the language that you want to learn. I can't wait to use Rosetta Stone and finally speak better than my 9 year old who's been learning Spanish in his own way. Rosetta Stone is the trusted expert for 30 years with millions of users and 25 languages offered. Spanish, French, Italian, German, Korean. I could go on fast language acquisition. Rosetta Stone immerses you in many ways. There are no English translations so you can really learn to speak, listen and think in that language. Start the new year off with a resolution you can reach today. The Moth listeners can take advantage of this Rosetta Stones lifetime membership for 50% off visit rosettastone.com moth that's 50% off. Unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your Life. Redeem your 50% off@RosettaStone.com moth today.
- [02:09]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This podcast is brought to you by stamps.com with your busy schedule, we're sure making trips to the post office is the last thing you have time for. Did you know with stamps.com you can buy and print official US postage right from your own computer and printer. It's easy and convenient. Plus stamps.com will give you a digital scale. It automatically calculates the exact postage you need for any letter or package. You print the postage directly onto envelopes, labels, or even plain paper. Then just hand your mail to your mail carrier. There's no need for you to go to the post office again or even lease one of those expensive postage meters. Right now, there's a special offer for listeners of the Moth podcast, a no risk trial, plus a $110 bonus offer that includes the digital scale and up to $55 free postage. Don't wait. Go to stamps.com and click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, then type in moth. That's stamps.com, enter moth. The story you're about to hear by Dr. George Lombardi was told live in New York last year at our annual collaboration with the World Science Festival. The theme of the night was Too close to the Stories of Flashpoints.
- [03:40]
Dr. George Lombardi
It was a Saturday afternoon in September 1989, and I was home alone unpacking boxes when the phone rang and a woman that I did not know started to interrogate me. Are you Dr. Lombardi? Are you Dr. George Lombardi? Are you an infectious disease specialist? Did you live and work and do research in East Africa? Are you considered to be an expert in tropical infections? Would you consider yourself to be an expert in viral hemorrhagic fevers? At this point I paused and I gathered myself and I asked the obvious question. Who are you? She introduced herself and said she was the representative of a world figure and a Nobel laureate, someone who was suspected to have a viral hemorrhagic fever, and she was calling to ask if I would consult on the case. Now, I found this highly improbable. I was 32 years old. I had just opened my office. The phone never rang. I had no patience. In fact, I remember staring at the phone, trying to will it to ring. But she persisted, and she mentioned that she had gotten my name from a colleague of mine who had told her to call Dr. Lombardi. He knows a lot about very weird things. She arranged a conference call, and in 10 minutes I was transported through the telephone wires to a small hospital in Calcutta, India, where I found out for the first time that the patient was Mother Teresa, and on the line were her two main Indian doctors. We chatted and discussed the details of the case for about an hour, and though those details are now hazy, to me what came through the staticky wires was their deep, abiding concern for their patient. These guys were worried. I wished them well. As I got off the line and I went back to unpack some boxes, she called an hour later. She said they were very impressed by what you had to say and they'd like you to go to Calcutta. I'm making the arrangements. I can get you out tomorrow afternoon on the Concorde for the first leg. I said, this is impossible, as I had just discovered, just found my passport in one of these boxes. And I told her it had expired three months before. She said, that's a minor detail. Meet me in front of your building tomorrow morning, Sunday at 7:00am well, as you can probably surmise, I'm somebody who pretty much does what he's told. So 7 o'clock the next morning, she comes careening down the block in a wood paneled station wagon with bad shock absorbers. I jump in. The next stop's the passport office at Rockefeller center, where on a Sunday morning, a State Department official came, let us in, took my picture and handed me in 15 minutes a brand new passport. The next stop was the Indian consulate where again, on a Sunday morning, the entire staff came in full dress uniform to give me an honor guard procession, which I walked past. As they ushered me into the concert himself, who affixed the visa to my passport, he leaned in towards me and said, we bestow our blessings on you. The eyes of the world are upon you now. I knew who Mother Teresa was, of course, but this was my first realization in finding out what she meant not just to the world, but to the Indian people. I get back in the car, I'm getting into this. Where next? She says, we're ahead of schedule. I'm going to drop you off. I'll be back at 11am I'll meet you downstairs. Sure enough, 11am tired, squealing, she pulls up with one addition. In the back seat of the station wagon are wedged five sisters of charity, five nuns, as if sitting on a perch. They start handing me letters and envelopes and small packages wrapped in burlap and tied with twine and handing me these things and saying, if you see Sister Narita and Sister Rafael, please give her this for me. I'm a courier. This is all before Homeland Security. We barrel off to jfk and when we get there, I ask sotto voce, why are the nuns here? They could have just given you these things. I don't understand why they had to come to the airport. And I was told, well, I didn't know how to tell you this, but you don't have a confirmed seat on the Concorde. You're flying standby. So my eyes widened. Well, the sisters are going to go up and down the line of ticketed passengers and beg until someone gives up their se. I stood off to the side as I watched this scene unfold just out of earshot as these Five nuns surround this first New York City businessman. He's listening to them. He's looking over at me, he's looking back at them. He shakes his head no, he's sorry, he can't help. They move on to the next one. And now I can hear their voices which obviously have been raised. And in about 15 seconds he realizes that resistance is futile and he hands over his ticket. They come towards me and they hand me this ticket as an offering. And they have small triumphal grins on each of their faces, the non equivalent of a high five. I wag my finger at them. I said, you sisters are little devils. I'm going to tell Mother Teresa what you just did. And they laughed and that broke the tension. Next stop Calcutta. 24 hours in flight, 100 degrees, 100% 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 they 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. And she says the 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 down gown to listen to her heart and lungs, the nuns that 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 clear 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 buffy coat smears and my Zhang preps and we agree we'll meet the next morning at 9am As I leave the hotel, I'm set upon 5,000 pilgrims who are holding a candle lit prayer vigil. I escape back to the hotel where I pour myself a stiff drink and order room service for dinner and 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 reporter 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 48 hours, she's in septic shock, the rude unhinging of the mechanism 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 dewdrops on the blood culture plate. This is important. This could be a bacterial infection. This is an important clue. And the second is the Pope's cardiologist, flies in from Rome. He's an impressive man, straight from central casting, a head of silver hair, a Brioni suit, Hermes tie, Gucci loafers. And at our first meeting, when I tell the group of doctors excitedly that the cultures are turning positive, 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 vesuviusly. Out of the question. HE BELLOWS this is a clear case of malaria. Well, if they could diagnose malaria anywhere, it would 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, Merck Emanuele. And in a scene right out of Shakespeare, as he talks, he's pounding the lectern. If you listen, boom, boom, boom to this American upstart, boom. I will not be held responsible. Boom. The sounds ricochet through the somber conference room like gunshots. And in that moment, in that instant, I looked into the eyes of the courtly, elegant Indian doctors, and they had lost respect for him. They asked us to wait outside as they considered their options. I sat there with my vinyl knapsack and my socks with sandals. He sat next to me, elegantly attired, with two equally elegantly attired attaches from the Italian consulate. They called us back in and said, we've decided to go with Dr. Lombardi. He silently packed his bag, left the hospital, went directly to the airport and flew out of the country. I said, let's get that pacemaker out. And. And they looked at me. You want it out, you have to take it out. I said, I've never done that before. They gave me this wonderful non verbal Bengali head waddle like so. I went down to her room. I banished the nuns. I got a charge nurse and a basic tray, and I prepared the patient. The pacemaker box came out readily, but the wire, the wire that had been sitting in her right ventricles for several months was tethered into place and it would not budge. I twisted and turned and did all kinds of little body English and this thing was stuck. I started to sweat. My glasses fogged over. There have been stories if you pull hard enough, you can put a hole in the ventricle and she could bleed into her chest and die within a matter of minutes. So in the most surreal moment, I said a prayer to Mother Teresa, for Mother Teresa. And this catheter came loose. I took it out, I cultured the tip, and I proved that this pacemaker was the cause of her infection. She got better. Her fever broke. She woke up a couple of days later. She's sitting in a chair, eating. My work was done, but they wouldn't let me leave. I stayed another two weeks as I was the only doctor who could start her IVs who could thread these catheters into these tiny, fragile, elderly woman's veins. It's a skill I had picked up in the mid-1970s as a medical student at NYU Bellevue, where I learned to start IVs in the hardened veins of IV drug addicts. It's a skill I honestly thought I would never, ever need again. When it was my time to leave, they held a press conference and they publicly thanked me. And that's why I'm able to tell this story. I flew back to my life and to my two sons, one of whom is here. She lived another eight years and I saw her periodically. But the best part of this for me is that I have an ongoing relationship with the sisters. They're a wonderful group of women. They truly do God's work, however you may want to define that. And I take care of whatever their medical problems are. Several months ago, the mother superior came in, I had to fill out some paperwork, and she brought two young novitiates with her, and she asked me, Dr. Lombardi, can we go to the back? Can they see the pictures? I have some pictures on the wall that memorialize this trip and they like to see the faces of the other sisters when they were so young. And I said, of course. And we go to the back and they're oohing and ahhing. And one young novitiate squeezed my arm and she says, Dr. Lombardi, you represent a link to our past. And I said, I'm deeply honored by that. And the other sister says to me, Dr. Lombardi, in the convent we think of you as a rock star.
- [19:53]
Dan Kennedy
Dr. George Lombardi is a lifelong New Yorker and a graduate of City College in New York and New York University School of Medicine. He has a private practice in New York, two sons of whom he is enormously proud, and a fabulous Czech girlfriend. And here's something from one of our sponsors when your entire team can get together, it's amazing what can get accomplished. But gathering everybody together from different locations can be time consuming and expensive unless you use GoToMeeting. With HD faces, it makes it easy for your entire team to get together online whenever you need to, no matter how far away people are. With GoToMeeting, you share the same screen and it's simple to launch or join a meeting from anywhere using your computer, smartphone or tablet. And you can even present from your iPad. Now start working smarter with GoToMeeting. Today, try GoToMeeting free for 30 days. Don't wait for this special offer, visit GoToMeeting.com Click the Try it Free button and use the promo code Moth. Remember, use the promo code moth. Here's a note for our listeners in Portland, Maine. The Moth Main Stage is coming to the State theater in Portland, Maine on Thursday, June 6. For ticketing information and for a list of all of our upcoming tour stops, visit themoth.org Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy.
- [21:24]
Dr. George Lombardi
Is a writer and performer living in.
- [21:26]
Sponsor Representative
New York and author of the new.
- [21:28]
Dan Kennedy
Novel American Spirit, available May 28. Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make Public Radio more public@prx.org.