This was widely considered an unhelpful response from the CDC researchers, and I don’t disagree with that. We were some of the smartest scientists, geneticists, and virologists in the world. We were working as hard as we could on the problem. And it seemed like the problem was working equally hard to elude us.
Natasha Lawrence:
The meningitis phase affected substantially fewer people than the flu phase but the mortality rate was substantially higher. About a quarter of the deaths associated with Haden’s came from people who died in the second phase. That’s because the phase didn’t just present meningitis-like symptoms. The virus invaded deep into the brain and started altering brain structure in significant ways. It was literally making the brain rewire its own connections. That was another thing we didn’t know a virus could really do.
In the lab we would talk about this virus like it was an evil genius. Like it was a Bond villain. It was a joke, and a way to have a little bit of levity in an otherwise depressing race against time. But in some ways it wasn’t a joke at all. I think the general thought around the CDC was that this virus was actually the closest thing to malicious that a virus could get.
Monique Davis:
You could see how the second phase of the virus was working in our patients, the ones that were conscious, anyway. It would be like a series of little strokes. A little aphasia here, some loss of hearing or sight there, someone having a bit of Bell’s Palsy over on the next bed. Sometimes the patient would snap back immediately—the brain rewiring itself on the fly, I guess—and sometimes they’d just get worse. Some of them didn’t progress, they just died. I had one patient stop talking to me mid-sentence. It took me a minute to realize she had passed. I honestly thought she had paused to collect her thoughts.
With the meningitis phase a lot of what we were doing, to be entirely upfront about it, was keeping the patients as comfortable as we could while we waited out whatever the virus was doing to their brain. A lot of people we couldn’t help, and their bodies just sort of let go. Most survived and most of them seemed to recover all right, with lesser or greater short-term cognitive shortfalls that were eventually addressed with therapies similar to what stroke victims get after an incident. Some experienced permanent brain damage, again to a greater or lesser extent—there was no way to tell how bad it was going to be until it was over.
And then there were the people who experienced Lock In.
PART TWO
HADEN’S SYNDROME
Neal Joseph, Biographer and Author of “The President’s Crucible: The First Year of Haden’s Syndrome”:
I talked to David Haden, President Haden’s younger brother, and the thing he told me that stuck in my head was that the President absolutely hated when the disease started being called “Haden’s syndrome.” Absolutely hated it. David said, and I remember this clearly, that it was, “Not because it reminded everyone that he was President when it hit. It was because it was named for Margie. He hated that from the minute it stuck until the end of time, everyone would think of Margie as being sick. Of being trapped in her own self. As being the person you thought of, when you thought of Haden’s syndrome. Ben married this wonderful, physical, healthy, gorgeous woman and no one but him would ever think of her that way again.”
Janis Massey, Chief of Staff for Margaret Haden, First Lady of the United States of America:
After Margie got sick we looked at her schedule to see when it might have happened, when that first contact with the virus might have been. After ten minutes we threw up our hands. The First Lady’s schedule for the couple of weeks before she got sick had her at six events a day across five time zones in two different countries. One of those days she came into contact with school children, hospital patients, and the Prime Minister of Canada within six hours of each other. The only people who come into contact with more people on a daily basis than the First Lady are toll booth operators.
She could have gotten it from any of the people she met. She could have gotten it from us, her staff; some of us got sick around the same time and at one point half of us were out of the office with it. She could have gotten it from Ben’s staff, many of whom also got sick. It was impossible to pinpoint. Which makes Margie like nearly everyone else who got sick with the virus.
Col. Lydia Harvey, MD (Ret.), Physician to the President:
The First Lady came to see me on the afternoon of the 13th, after a staff meeting, and said she was feeling achy and wanted to know if I could do anything about it. As I examined her we talked about our upcoming plans for Valentine’s Day—well, she talked about hers and I admitted I had no plans because my husband was as romantic as a fish, and I’m really not much better. She laughed and said the President was the same way, but she liked an excuse to have a nice dinner for just the two of them.
By this time I was obviously aware of what was then still called the Super Bowl flu—the President had been briefed on it by the CDC and I had been allowed to sit in on the briefing because of my position as presidential physician. But the presentation initially seemed much more like the bird flu variant that had been present at the time, and I knew that the First Lady had missed her flu vaccination—an oversight on the part of my staff. I told her it was likely to be that, though it might be the Super Bowl flu instead, and that in either case she should consider cancelling her schedule for the next couple of days and resting. She agreed to reduce her schedule for the next day but was adamant about her dinner date with the President. I told her that would probably be fine.
Elizabeth Torres, Personal Assistant to the First Lady:
The First Lady was under the weather for Valentine’s Day and for a few days afterward but it didn’t seem like whatever flu she had was getting the better of her. She trimmed down her schedule mostly to planning sessions with the staff, made only a few unavoidable personal appearances and kept herself hydrated. She was sick but it was a highly functional sick, if you know what I mean.
At the end of the week she decided that she was feeling better and that she could do a full weekend schedule. This included the Maryland Winter Girl Scout Jamboree, where she was going to give a speech at the closing ceremonies. She had been a Girl Scout herself, so this was something she didn’t want to miss if she could avoid it.
Saturday she was fine. If she was feeling poorly she kept it to herself. She spent the morning using the White House studio for radio interviews and then had personal time for the rest of the day. When I left she seemed good. No more or less tired than she might have otherwise been. I assumed that she was over the flu.
Sunday morning she said she felt stiff and had a headache, but she said she thought it was probably due to a large margarita she had while she was binge watching old episodes of Orange is the New Black and then sleeping poorly. I suggested she might want to see the doctor on staff that morning, but she waved me off and took Tylenol instead and then we headed off to the Jamboree.
Ann Watson, former Reporter, WHAG-TV:
I was supposed to get three minutes with the First Lady before she went up and gave her speech, but when we arrived we were told by her press secretary Jean Allison that she wasn’t going to give any pre-speech interviews. Well, I was more than a little annoyed by this. The only reason we were at the Jamboree at all was because we were promised face time, otherwise we would have just had a cameraman do crowd shots for the last two minutes of the 6:30 broadcast. I told Jean that, and reminded her that it was her office who set up the interview, not us. She apologized and kind of ducked in toward me and said “look, she’s really not feeling well and we’re just trying to get her through this thing,” and that she would make it up to me. Then she walked off.