It had been a while since I read Contagion and I just reread it to continue writing my fic but!!! They really just had this boy out of bed *and fighting crime* after his muscles had been hemorrhaging and he almost died because of it!!! I’m going to S c r e a m
YES! LET’S TALK ABOUT CONTAGION AND EBOLA FOR A SEC. Let’s go there, let’s do this, because YOU’RE RIGHT AND YOU SHOULD SAY IT.
Look. This is how Tim is PARTWAY THROUGH HIS ILLNESS.
Listen. The Clench is a fictionalized version of the Ebola virus, which is a Level 4 pathogen. It’s a hemorrhagic virus. The way it works is that Ebola gets into your body via contact with some fluid from an infected person—sweat, blood, diarrhea, tears, whatever. And you get infected as well, and the Ebola filovirus particles—they’re a lot like spaghetti—start taking over your cells, one by one, and using them as replication factories until they fall apart after about the hundredth, or thousandth, or millionth Ebola virus particle is made and the cell finally has nothing left to give.
Do you know what that does to your body tissues??
IT LIQUIFIES THEM. IT FREAKING LIQUIFIES THEM. Your body dissolves from the inside out! That’s why it’s a “bleeding-out virus”! You feel like you have a flu until you suddenly start vomiting, and your gastrointestinal system, which has a fairly high cellular turnover in the first place, is one of the first parts of your body to noticably start bleeding. You start puking blood, or partially digested blood. Ebola attacks pretty much EVERY tissue in your body except bone and skeletal muscle. Everything is fair game. So you start bleeding from every possible spot, basically, and in advanced stages you’ll bleed from the site of any needle prick or whatever.
So Tim is infected with a hypothetical Ebola virus that instead of taking days to kill, takes only 12 hours, and it’s a very rapid progression. He’s gotten so weak in just a few hours. He’s bleeding from his eyes, his body is turning into liquefied bloody slime on the inside, his muscles are being liquefied, his organs are dying, he’s got a fever that’s high as all get-out. He’s on oxygen. He can hardly move. He’s in a lot of pain. He’s ACTIVELY DYING. In the comics, by the time they get Tim the “cure”, he’s probably only minutes to an hour or two away from the final bleed-out and crash. His breathing is bad enough for him to need increasing levels of oxygen support. He’s really, really sick.
Then he gets the cure! And aside from being tired he’s suddenly like. All fine????
What?
Remember the last time you had the flu, or the stomach flu? That’s not even Ebola, but it knocks you FLAT. You’re tired. You’re sore. When you’re finally able to get out of bed and like, wash up for the first time in a while, or eat some soup, you crash hard partway through because you have not stamina left and you’re running on empty in a body that was attacked and inflamed and full of fever and joint aches and blah blah blah. A cold makes you feel run down. A flu knocks you down several flights of stairs and takes days to weeks to recover from enough to function at your normal baseline without fatigue or worse. Ebola DISSOLVES YOUR BODY!!!!!!!!! It’s the flu on steroids with a side helping of turning you into bloody tissue slime! Tim’s lost a lot of blood overnight, he’s lost a lot of muscle, he’s probably in need of some level of kidney support and other organ support as well because of the hits THEY’VE taken, he’s a growing teen with a fast metabolism too, which means his immune response will have been stronger than some peoples’ which means his fever and stuff was likely higher too, which is exhausting in and of itself.
This boy should be stuck in bed for days, minimum, aside from some assisted trips to the bathroom and time sitting in a chair here and there. It’s going to take days and weeks and potentially even months for his body to undo the damage done to it. He’ll heal, because he’s young and was VERY in shape, and has great support. But it’s not that fast. Even if he was given a cure that pretty much wiped out the Ebola in his body instantly, which is what we’ve essentially seen happen with some of the Ebola patients on the brink of death who were given one of the antibody drugs (especially the very first man who got ZMapp, that’s well worth reading about), IT ONLY WIPES OUT THE EBOLA. It’s not a magic cure-all that repairs all your tissue and muscle and everything.
So Tim would not be out of bed and smiling like this:
He would be in bed. MAYBE smiling. Probably passed out 98% of the time, sleeping and repairing damage for a while. He probably would be able to make a careful, assisted bathroom trip once the cure kicked in and he was suddenly feeling a lot better and had a much-lessened fever. But there’s no way he should be this “cured” suddenly. This isn’t a poison where once you counteract it you have a chunk of time feeling worn out and then your body’s good. He’s MISSING PART OF HIS BODY, his tissues were directly attacked, even his brain would potentially have been being invaded. Tim wouldn’t make it out of the cave in that state, much less stumble his way around GOTHAM. And even if he HAD, Catwoman should have hauled his little butt right back to Mr. Batman and said “here’s your child please make sure he doesn’t kill himself on accident by overtaxing his heart, or liver, or lungs, or whatever else after ALMOST BEING DEAD A FEW HOURS AGO.”
And that’s not even including the pain Tim would likely be in still and how sore he’d be and how much bruising he’d likely have!
GET THAT CHILD BACK TO BED AND BEING TAKEN CARE OF OR I’LL DO IT FOR YOU @ BATFAMILY AND COMIC WRITERS!!!
