The Gun Counter

Eight years old, wiry and ponytailed, Precious Reynolds bounds from the elevator to the entrance of the pediatric intensive-care unit. She fidgets impatiently as she waits to be buzzed in, eager to return to the clinic where, by the ironclad expectations of 2,000 years of medicine, she should have died. It was nine months ago, here at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, California, that Precious survived a confirmed bout of rabies—a disease that for most of human history was considered to be fatal in 100 percent of cases.

Today, though, Precious is back just to visit. In the halls of the pediatric ward, where zoo animals cavort in backlit photos, doing their best to dispel the hospital pall, the nurses who treated Precious greet her with delight. She does not remember them at all. But she speaks shyly to each, listening as they recount to her, in turn, their roles in rescuing her. She grows more talkative when describing the life she has resumed back in Willow Creek, in the wilds of California’s Humboldt County. To get in shape for the peewee wrestling season, Precious has been running laps in the long driveway of the farm where she lives with her siblings and grandparents. She also has resumed her pursuit of “mutton bustin’,” a sport in which kids ride rodeo-style on the backs of frantic sheep for as long as they can; at a recent match, she took home the third-place purse of $23.

Precious’ brush with death began with a simple flu-like illness that soon was accompanied by some odd symptoms: head and neck pain, weakness in her legs. At the hospital, a nurse asked her to drink something, but she choked, unable to swallow the fluid. “She looked at me like ‘Grandma, please help,’” her grandmother, Shirlee Roby, recalls. “I could tell this was no damn flu.” Her symptoms were so severe that the local hospital decided to transfer her by helicopter to UC Davis. When the state health department heard the symptoms and the fact that the patient had come from rural Humboldt County, it immediately suspected rabies. Lab tests confirmed the diagnosis: Precious had antibodies against the disease in her blood serum and cerebrospinal fluid, an impossibility in the absence of infection or vaccination. As it turned out, a feral cat had bitten her a few weeks before as she played outside her elementary school. But no one had thought to treat her at the time, and now it was too late for the standard intervention against rabies—a vaccine, administered in multiple shots over the course of two weeks, that allows the body to mount an immune response before the virus reaches the brain. In Precious’ case, it was clear that her brain had already been infected.