Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Times piece, she’s been inundated with middle-class mommies who’ve been to Florida or Mexico on vacation who are worried they now have a Zika baby. “But I was in João Pessoa earlier in my pregnancy.” She’s unmoved. “It’s the epicenter of the outbreak.” “Did you even have a mosquito bite?” she says, still skeptical. I pull up a photo of my body covered in them that I’d sent to Tom during the trip, worried that I’d been bitten by bedbugs. Still unimpressed, she grudgingly books me in for an ultrasound. She cautions that they still don’t really know much about the disease and that means both diagnosis and treatment are difficult. The day of the ultrasound, as I lie prone on the chair, feet in stirrups, the technician peppers me with questions about why I traveled somewhere so dangerous. I bristle and tell her I didn’t know about the risk, and we fall into an awkward silence. “How do you diagnose it?” I ask. “We haven’t diagnosed any here. I don’t think there’s been a Zika baby born in the US yet.…” That “yet” hangs in the air. “What are you looking for?” “Calcification around the eyes, head size, anything abnormal. You heading back into work?” Why was she trying to change the subject? What was she seeing on that screen? In the end, they don’t spot anything, but they also tell me that they probably wouldn’t be able to diagnose it while the baby’s still inside me. As one of the doctors put it, “We don’t really know exactly what we’re looking for anyway.”