His wasted frame was tucked beneath a white sheet on a metal hospital cot, arms spindly and useless by his sides. Never a husky man, he had lost more than a third of his weight since the virus set upon him nearly two months earlier. Tuan had withered to eighty-four pounds. His head was propped up slightly on a thin pillow. His face seemed frozen in horror, cheeks sunken and lips agape. His bulging eyes were fixed, staring for hours at the ceiling as if the young man was still haunted by a specter that the doctors had predicted would surely claim him. Never before had the specialists in the intensive care unit of Hanoi’s Bach Mai Hospital seen anyone survive such a massive attack. “We thought there was no way Mr. Tuan could make it,” confided Dr. Nguyen Hong Ha, head of the ICU, as he stood just outside the doorway. “No patient who we’ve put on a mechanical ventilator has ever survived.” Yet when I visited Tuan, the twenty-one-year-old had already cheated death. He no longer needed the machine to help him breathe.
