Breathing easier

It was known as consumption. The white plague. A disease that ignited fear and panic for generations.

Worldwide, tuberculosis remains a major killer, causing about 1.7 million deaths each year. And new, multidrug- resistant strains increasingly complicate treatment.

In most parts of this country, though, including the Inland Northwest, tuberculosis seems like a relic of another era. About a dozen or so people, mostly those who are foreign-born or are transients, still contract the disease each year in Spokane County, says Dr. Kim Thorburn, health officer for the Spokane Regional Health District.

But around the turn of the last century, tuberculosis loomed as a major problem in this area.

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Washington Tuberculosis Association, which grew out of a meeting on Sept. 12, 1906, of the State Medical Society in Spokane. The group eventually became the American Lung Association of Washington.

In 1915, Edgecliff Sanitarium, the only modern TB hospital in Eastern Washington, opened its doors. It would stay open until 1978, treating hundreds upon hundreds of patients, first simply with rest and relaxation and later with drugs and surgery. The sanitarium, once decayed and vandalized into an eyesore, was remodeled in 1992 and reopened as Park Place retirement community.

One newspaper article from the sanitarium’s early days described the building this way: “It is as trim as a warship and it is ready for battle against disease.”

Battle was an apt metaphor.

Dr. George Rodkey, who now lives in Post Falls, served as medical director at Edgecliff from 1958 until its closure. By the time Rodkey arrived, antibiotics were making huge strides in treating the disease. But Rodkey remembers asking the sanitarium’s previous director what the days before antibiotics were like.

“He said, ‘You know, it was very discouraging,’ ” Rodkey, now 80, recalls. ‘“We would have two people with the same amount of disease. One of them would get well, and one would die.”

Children and pregnant young women were hit especially hard by the disease, he says.

Tuberculosis is caused by a slow-growing bacterium. It passes from person to person by infected droplets of saliva or mucous. The infection then invades the small sacs of the lungs and can spread to other organs through the lymph system and bloodstream. Symptoms – such as weight loss, lack of energy, fever, cough and night sweats – often don’t appear until the disease is already advanced.

Yvonne Lakel, 76, of Spokane worked a variety of jobs at Edgecliff between 1958 and 1968.

Even though the sanitarium housed sick people, Lakel says, “It wasn’t depressing.”

Patients who were able to be up and about were kept busy with a variety of activities. There were arts and craft classes, occupational therapy sessions, a library and movies. A schoolteacher taught classes for anyone who wanted to learn.

As treatments improved, patients’ stays at Edgecliff became shorter and shorter. People with TB used to spend two-and-a-half or three years at the sanitarium. By the early 1960s, though, treatments lasted an average of six months.

One man, Edward Pennington, spent more than 22 years as an Edgecliff patient before his release in 1958.

“It’s just like starting all over again,” Pennington told the Spokane Daily Chronicle when he was discharged. “I’ll have to learn all over again. … I’ll have to catch up, too, on conversational subjects. I’ve kept up, of course, with current events, but that’s just been reading or listening. Now I’ll have to learn to talk with people in the workaday world.”

When Pennington, known to everyone at the sanitarium as “Penny” entered Edgecliff in 1936, doctors could do little more than urge patients to rest. By the time he left, new drugs and surgical techniques had revolutionized the disease’s treatment.

Rosanne Montague never spent time at Edgecliff. The sanitarium was long-closed by the time the Spokane woman was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 2004.

Montague, now 72, still has no idea how she contracted TB. Spots were visible on her lungs during an X-ray to examine a mass on her colon.

Looking back now, Montague realizes she did have some symptoms.

“I had experienced quite a lot of fatigue,” she says. “I could remember telling my husband, ‘I could just go back to bed.’ I lost some weight, which I was delighted about.”

The Spokane Health District took over her case, and she was immediately started on a treatment of four antibiotics.

She had to come to the health district each day to be monitored while taking the pills. Later, health district workers visited her home twice a week to watch her take her medicine.

And, after a while, she was given a video phone so health district workers could watch her down the antibiotics from afar. She underwent the drug therapy for six months.

“They have to see you take them,” she says. “Compliance is a problem. … They make you feel worse than you did before.”

Montague says she is now feeling great and is golfing four days a week.

Even though TB infection is rare today in the Inland Northwest, Thorburn believes the disease probably will never be eradicated. And it’s certainly not time to relegate the disease to the history books, she says.

“You have to maintain a certain level of resources devoted to this infection,” Thorburn says. “We just need to maintain the resources to deal with that when they arrive and make sure it doesn’t spread to the community.”

Before she retired, Montague worked as a clerk for Spokane County for 32 years. That was during the time the county operated Edgecliff, and she remembers passing a display case in the courthouse each day filled with ceramics made by sanitarium residents. She eventually took a couple of the creations home with her.

“When I got (them), it was something out of ancient history,” she says. “I’d never known anybody who had TB.”