Drained by persistent diarrhea, she lost weight. Her lymph nodes swelled and stayed swollen. She told a friend: “I’d better go home to die.” Back in Denmark, tests revealed a shortage of T cells. Her breath came with such difficulty that she depended on bottled oxygen. She struggled against staph infections. Candida fungus glazed her mouth. By the time Grethe Rask died, on December 12, 1977, her lungs were clogged with Pneumocystis jirovecii, and that seems to have been what killed her.
