To All the Books I’ve Read Before: A Series
Heartfelt letters to some of my most cherished companions
Monday: The Killers’ Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug-Resistant Bacteria
To The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug-Resistant Bacteria,
It’s been quite a long time since I’ve seen you, and frankly I haven’t heard much about you since a Model UN competition pushed you into my arms in high school. Hopefully you’re getting a Netflix documentary deal or something so we can get back together soon; after all, you seem pretty on-trend right now.
Now, you stick out from the rest of these books like a sore thumb because no part of your book is fiction. I highly doubt your work will become a literary behemoth on the level of The Aeneid, but maybe it will be a work of science literature as cherished as The Hot Zones or On the Origin of the Species. Frankly, I’ve never met another person who has even leafed through your pages, but I guess that has little impact on my journey with you.
Most of the science literature I flirted with at the time were too dense for a girl with nothing but high-school biology. You, however, started each of your chapters with a person: a mother with necrotizing fasciitis, a school shooting victim running out of viable antibiotic options, a young female epidemiologist investigating MRSA. A young female epidemiologist investigating MRSA. As you recounted this young female epidemiologist typing notes in her hotel room I couldn’t help but realize that the image you showed me was myself. I could be the one tracking bacterial spread while crunching mutation data into a computer. I could track the new mutations of the pathogen. The stories of doctors and scientists from the rest of your chapters were of all genders, creeds, and walks of life, but that didn’t matter anymore. In each of them, I saw a job I would be competent to take (with proper training, of course).
Following my revelation, you became responsible for a lot of my browser history as I immersed myself in the idea of the next big outbreak. You led me to a STEM high school and a CDC summer camp. Now that I’m living through “the next big outbreak,” I keep my fingers crossed that the passion you started will lead to a career where I can prevent some suffering in the next generation.
To be honest, you had all but faded from my memory until this March. As grocery stores emptied and Dr. Fauci’s wrinkles multiplied, I began to sleep like Dr. Morris when he heard about the emergence of Vancomycin-resistant Staph. aureus. How interesting, that my first instinct was to find him online and tell him I now partially understand how he felt. This coexistence of dread and protective instinct was, in fact, a human emotion felt by another individual before. Phew!
I then set to cleaning out my bookshelf with some of my new-found “free time,” and due to my state of nihilism I truly did not show much mercy. You, however, just had to flash your puppy-dog eyes and whimper “After all I’ve shown you?” I don’t often get attached to objects, but at that point I decided that I would keep you as a token of everything you assured me that I could one day be.
Thank you,
Ellie Rose
Stay tuned for more letters to all kinds of books, all week long
You can purchase The Killers Within on Amazon here
