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Posted on 04/16/2003 11:27:49 PM PDT by per loin

Nguyen Thi Men no longer recognizes her gaunt body. Her once fit physique is now weak and sluggish. Her walk is a shuffle, her right foot sliding slowly after her left.

The veteran nurse says severe acute respiratory syndrome has ravaged her body - even affecting her memory and vision. Still, every time she feels like complaining, she stops herself: She knows she's the only medical worker at the Hanoi French Hospital to come off a respirator alive after treating Vietnam's contagious "index case."

"I had to fight for my life," Men said inside her small living room in Hanoi. "My friends and relatives called to send their condolences."

Men, 46, works mostly in pediatrics and has handed many newborns to smiling mothers since she began working at Hanoi's only international hospital in 1999. But on Feb. 26, she was working a shift that required her to care for Johnny Chen, an American businessman from Shanghai who got sick after flying to Hanoi from Hong Kong.

She went in and out of Chen's room several times, checking his IV and other machines and trying to make him comfortable. Chen, a tall, thick man, spit up mucus for 40 minutes to clear his clogged airway.

Chen was eventually evacuated to Hong Kong, where he died. He later became known as Vietnam's index case after unknowingly infecting dozens of hospital workers with a deadly new virus that would eventually be known worldwide as SARS.

Within several days, Men herself started to feel fatigued. Her body ached, she had diarrhea and chills. When she called in sick, she learned that 10 other hospital workers had similar symptoms.

After being admitted March 5, her condition rapidly deteriorated. Doctors sliced a hole in her throat and inserted a tube for the respirator.

She remembers talking to Carlo Urbani, the World Health Organization doctor who was credited with first identifying the outbreak. He died of the disease on March 29.

Eventually Men lost consciousness for nine days.

"It was very difficult to breathe," she said. "I felt just like a person who was going to die from drowning."

She was listed in critical condition and her chances of survival began to look worse as colleagues who also treated the index case began to die. First a Vietnamese nurse succumbed, then a French doctor, then another Vietnamese nurse and doctor - all in a nine-day period.

Slowly, Men says she began to regain consciousness. She remembers doctors standing over her and speaking in French about x-rays of her chalky lungs. She mumbled for them to keep sucking the fluid out. They did so every three minutes and she fought to survive.

"I did everything I could," she said. "I tried very, very hard and tried every possible way to regain my life."

No one fully understands why, but Men started to get stronger and eventually recovered. She was discharged April 2, nearly a month after being admitted.

"She has been very lucky," said Yves Nicolai, hospital general director. "I think she's strong. She must not ask the question (why she was the only one to survive). She has to take it as a reality and go on."

The French Hospital has been closed for decontamination. An army team will spray the building with disinfectant from top to bottom and scrub everything inside.

At her small home tucked in a neighborhood just behind Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, Men stares forward and speaks slowly about her ordeal as if recalling a dream. Purple blotches still stain her nose and throat where the tubes once fed her nutrients and oxygen. She said she feels like she's living inside someone else's body.

Her right leg is partially paralyzed from a lack of circulation during the time spent in bed, and even small tasks exhaust her now. Her lungs are scarred and pains still shoot through her body. She says it will likely be another five to seven months before she feels normal again, and she's not sure her body will ever completely recover.

"I cannot imagine this disease. It was the worst pains all over your body," she said. "It's like you were being tortured. The pain was everywhere."

But after losing five colleagues, including a French doctor of Vietnamese origin who died Saturday, the mother of four says it will take more than SARS to keep her from returning to the hospital to help others.

"Once I go back to work, I hope to be preoccupied so I can get away from all these memories," she said. "This is a formidable disease. I'm still astonished as to why I was among the ones who survived."

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