from clots passing to the lungs greatly increases.
Rheumatic heart disease is not just a horror that afflicts young children. The corrupted antibodies go on gnawing away at the heart valves and muscles for decades, gradually affecting its victims more and more, taking between ten and twenty years to reveal itself as a serious, chronic and ultimately life-threatening disability.
* * *
Helen was taken to hospital in Cairo too late. The chance to kill off the infection had been missed. Antibody cross-reactivity had set in and she was irrevocably doomed to a life profoundly complicated by heart disease. Yet, true to form, those complications would not properly emerge for a further ten years, by which time she would be an attractive young woman just married to a tall and dashing Englishman.
Initially at a French convent in Zamalek, the affluent district of Cairo, genteel and cultured nuns had schooled her and her sisters. She was a bright, cheerful child, always smiling with a ready, rippling laugh and an irrepressible desire to please, secure and happy in their lush Gezira island-in-the-Nile home among flowering jacaranda, banana and golden mohr trees, and scented datura, whose white bell flowers swayed in the hot afternoon winds. But there was another side to her education.
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