The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (13 page)

Toward the end of the week, after 2 quarts of fluid had been drained, the pressure on Richmond’s chest suddenly eased. Months later, he called out “I can breathe!” as he recapitulated his moment of relief from the torment. “It was like a miracle. I can breathe!” In the course of the next few weeks, Richmond and McQue continued to improve, though Richmond suffered complications along the way, notably severe anemia. On November 9, Qieth McQue was deemed well enough to go home, and 5 days later, after 27 days in the hospital, Richmond was discharged.

Dr. Rosenthal thought about the fortunate sequence of events. After Qieth McQue had arrived in the emergency room on Saturday, his head scan and spinal tap “didn’t show anything.” But by then Leroy Richmond was known to have had anthrax. Rosenthal continued:

Rosenthal, like many of the doctors involved with the anthrax cases, was sought out by the news media. He saved his first interview for the newspaper that his father, A. M. Rosenthal, once edited, the
New York Times
.

Nearly a year later, neither Richmond nor McQue had fully recovered. Both remained at home much of the time, weak, tired, and suffering from short-term memory loss. But while Richmond seemed unresentful, McQue remained angry: “I feel like a pregnant moose,” said McQue. He wakes up nauseated and tired and needs daytime naps. “I’m 54 and I feel like I’m 90. I have to walk with a cane.” As difficult as their experiences have been, both men thank God for having survived. The outcomes for two of their co-workers turned out to be more tragic.

On Thursday, October 18, the day before Leroy Richmond sought medical care, his former card partner, Thomas Morris, went to the doctor. Morris was also a member of the Kaiser plan and visited one of the plan’s doctors in Maryland, near his home in Suitland. The doctor believed Morris’s fever, sweats, and muscle aches were symptoms of a viral infection. He dismissed Morris’s concerns that they might be related to anthrax and sent him home. Three days later, on Sunday, Morris dialed 911:

“What’s the problem?” the operator asked, according to the taped transcript.

“My breathing is very, very labored,” Morris answered.

“How old are you?”

“I’m 55. Ah, I don’t know if I have been, but I suspect that I might have been exposed to anthrax.”

The operator seemed flustered: “You know when or what—?”

“Ah, it was last what, last Saturday, a week ago last Saturday [October 13] morning at work. I work for the Postal Service. I’ve been to the doctor. I went to the doctor Thursday. He took a culture, but he never got back to me with the results. I guess there was some hangup over the weekend. I’m not sure. But in the meantime, I went through achiness and headachiness. This started Tuesday. Now I’m having difficulty breathing. And just to move any distance I feel like I’m going to pass out.”

In another portion of the tape Morris amplifies on his suspicion that he may have been exposed to anthrax:

“It was—a woman found the envelope and I was in the vicinity. It had powder in it. They never let us know whether the thing had—was anthrax or not. They never treated the people who were around this particular individual and the supervisor who handled the envelope. So I don’t know if it is or not. I’m just—I’ve never been able to find out. I’ve been calling. But the symptoms that I’ve had are what was described to me in a letter they put out, almost to the ‘T,’ except I haven’t had any vomiting until just a few minutes ago. I’m not bleeding, and I don’t have diarrhea. The doctor thought it was just a virus or something . . . So we went with that and I was taking Tylenol for the achiness. But the shortness of breath, now, I don’t know. That’s consistent with the—with anthrax.”

“But you weren’t the one that handled the envelope? It was someone else?”

“No, I didn’t handle it. But I was in the vicinity.”

“OK. And do you know what they did with the envelope at work?”

“I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything. I couldn’t even find out if—if the stuff was or wasn’t. I was told that it wasn’t, but I have a tendency not to believe these people.”

Following reports about Morris’s 911 call, Deborah Willhite, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Service, said that the FBI had tested the letter he mentioned and found no evidence of anthrax. Meanwhile, after the call, the operator dispatched an ambulance, which brought Morris to Greater Southeast Hospital in Washington. He arrived at 3 p.m. Less than 6 hours later, at 8:45 p.m., he was declared dead.

The following morning, Monday, October 22, Celeste Curseen also dialed 911 from her home in Clinton, Maryland. Two evenings earlier, her husband, Joe, had not been feeling well and had passed out while attending mass at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Clinton. The next day, Sunday, he felt worse—tired, nauseated, perspiring beads of sweat “as big as half dollars,” Mrs. Curseen said. She drove him to Southern Maryland Hospital in Clinton, where he was diagnosed with dehydration and gastroenteritis and sent home. Before dawn on Monday morning, she awoke to find him doubled over on the bathroom floor.

“He’s breathing just constantly. He’s got asthma, and he’s just constantly breathing hard and fast,” Celeste Curseen told the 911 operator.

“How long was it that he, um—?” the operator asked.

“I don’t know. I fell asleep. I was asleep and I just looked up and he was laying out in the bathroom there.”

“Is he able to talk to you normally?”

“No. He’s breathing so hard. Sometimes he won’t say anything for a period of time. But yes, he’s talking.”

“OK. Is he able to, say, talk in a complete sentence?”

“No, he’s just been answering my questions.”

Celeste helped her husband into the car and took him back to Southern Maryland Hospital. Dr. Venkat Mani, the hospital’s head of infectious diseases, was called in. He reviewed the reports of Curseen’s visit the previous day and saw nothing alarming in them. But now, after viewing Curseen’s blood under the microscope, he knew there was little that could be done. His blood was teeming with anthrax bacilli: “There were so many organisms on the smear, that we could directly see it. When you have a person with blood infection, and you see the bacteria on the blood smear, the patient will almost never survive. By that stage the bacteria [are] winning the battle.” Like his friend Mo, 6 hours after being admitted to the hospital, Joe Curseen was dead.

The day before, Sunday, when Curseen was brought to Southern Maryland Hospital, Leroy Richmond and Qieth McQue had already been hospitalized with suspected anthrax at Inova Fairfax. One week later, Dr. Ivan Walks, the health director for Washington, D.C., said that several hospitals in the area had been notified early about the anthrax cases at Inova. Southern Maryland was not among them. That hospital had been “outside of our perimeter for that symptom reporting,” Walks said. No longer. “Since then we have learned a lesson, and we’ve expanded that perimeter now.”

During the weekend of October 20-21, yet another mail handler in the area was feeling ill. “All I wanted to do on Saturday and Sunday was lay around and nap,” recalled David Hose in his Virginia-accented baritone. The next day, Monday, he reported for work at the State Department annex near Dulles Airport, where he supervised the sorting of mail for delivery to State Department offices. He sweated through a sleepless Monday night at his home in Winchester, Virginia, but went to work the next day. By Tuesday night, “I was getting aches and pains all over. Really terrible.” After a night of vomiting, he went with his wife to the emergency room at Winchester Medical Center. He had already begun to suspect he might have anthrax: “I mean I was really feeling strange. I’ve had the flu before. I’ve had bronchitis before. I’ve had pneumonia before. I’ve had all kinds of stuff, you know, years and years apart. But this felt like none of that.”

The emergency room doctor doubted that he had anthrax, said Hose. But he drew a blood sample and gave Hose a Cipro pill to take just in case. He wrote prescriptions for more of the antibiotic and for cough syrup and sent him home. The next morning, Thursday, October 25, Hose felt so sick that he decided to call 911. “I needed the rescue squad.” But at 7:55 a.m., as he was reaching for the phone, it began to ring. A voice announced that the results of his blood culture were in. “Mr. Hose, you definitely have anthrax. We’ll send an ambulance for you. You’ve got to get in here now.”

During his hospital stay, Hose repeatedly had fluid drained from his pleural cavity. At the same time, he developed bleeding ulcers and needed a blood transfusion and stomach cautery. On November 9, after 16 days of hospitalization, he was discharged. It was the same day that Qieth McQue was released from Inova Fairfax Hospital. Months later, like McQue and Richmond, Hose still felt sick. Although free of anthrax infection, like the other two men, he was weak, tired, and prone to memory lapses.

In August 2001, George DiFerdinando was appointed acting commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Health and Senior Services by Donald DeFrancesco, the acting governor. DeFerdinando will never forget his first staff meeting. “It began at 9 a.m. on September 11,” he said, pausing over a cup of coffee and a muffin nearly a year later in a luncheonette in Princeton. Born and raised in New Jersey, DeFerdinando had lived outside the state for most of the previous two decades. After completing medical school and a residency in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, he went to work for New York State’s Department of Health. Then in 2000 he became deputy commissioner of health in New Jersey.

Under a shock of thick black hair, he offered a quick smile as he recalled that initial staff meeting on September 11. Some 60 people were in the room. “I’m hyperactive,” he said, “and I’m always checking my BlackBerry.” His pocket-sized communicator indicated something about “breaking news.” Just then his secretary handed him a note saying two planes had hit the World Trade Center. “Wow,” he said aloud and informed the group. “I told everyone to go back to their stations.” In coordination with New York City officials, DiFerdinando led New Jersey’s public health response. Thousands of New Jerseyans—survivors and families of victims—had been touched directly by the airplane homicides. But whereas New Jersey was working with New York City on the September 11 event, the anthrax outbreak a few weeks later placed the state at center stage.