SASHA ELTERMAN'S NIGHTMARE
Even six months later, the story would not go away. The weekend magazine of Israel's most widely circulated daily, Yediot Ahronot, featured the most high-profile victim, Sasha Elterman, on the eve of her sixteenth birthday. Sasha, a dark-haired, lanky fifteen-year-old from Sydney, was a particularly promising tennis player with a training regime that included ten kilometers of daily running and dozens of laps at a swimming pool each day. It was her first trip to Israel, “the homeland,” and she was moved by her visit to Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, and key local attractions with her parents prior to the games.
“On the evening of the opening ceremonies, I stood together with all the delegation and it was our turn to move forward. We started to walk,” she recalled.
I truly remember that one of the kids that stood by me said: “There's no way we're going to go on that shaky thing.” I didn't even manage to answer him or think about the sentence, when I heard a shout, and immediately after, I fell into the water. There were people on top of me, and I was stuck in the mud and I couldn't get myself up above the water. From the stories of the other athletes, they pulled me from the Yarkon unconscious. After treatment in the ambulance they restored me to consciousness, and I remember they wanted to cut my clothes to treat me. With my last bit of strength I told them: “Don't cut my Maccabiah uniform.”[10]
Sasha lapsed into a coma within hours and woke up four days later in the hospital with her entire body aching. Little could she know that her nightmare
This was hardly good news—of the twenty-six diagnosed cases of P. boydii infection in the world, only four have survived.[12]P. boydii, a rela-tively ubiquitous fungus, is an opportunistic organism always ready to exploit a weakness in the body's defenses. Lung transplant recipients are at special risk because of their immunocompromised status. The fungi tend to colonize in the lungs or pleural cavities, producing a pneumonia that kills cells in its wake. The microbes and the deadly pus they spawn spread readily, disseminating to the brain, kidney, heart, and thyroid.[13]
Six months after the disaster, Sasha had been through three hundred X-rays and eighteen operations (thirteen of which were brain surgeries). She had lines inserted to bring food and medicine directly to her stomach, and three tubes for draining the excess fluids in her head, which had been put-ting pressure on her brain.[14] Her permanent lung function was 60 percent of what it was before the accident, and she was plagued with periodic con-vulsions.[15] Eventually, she recovered sufficiently to carry the Olympic torch a few hundred meters during the opening of the games in Sydney.
The outpouring of concern by Israel's public, including a visit by Nava Barak, the Prime Minister's wife, along with the ultimate conviction of the defendants for negligent homicide, may have ameliorated the family's frustration and sense of loss. But the Yarkon River's toxic touch was largely irreversible. Sasha's mother, Rosie Elterman, spoke candidly: “She won't be what she was before. She was extremely intelligent, skipped a grade, was an outstanding athlete, a quick thinker. And now, all that I want is that she should be average, just an ordinary girl. I dream that she may one day have a normal life.”[16]