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passenger. I later found out he was Mr. Toyoda, a colleague of the two staff members [
Mr. Takahashi and Mr. Hishinuma
] who died. He was the only one of the three injured station attendants who survived, and he was one of the longest in the hospital.
    The ambulance arrived. “Is he conscious?” they asked. “No!” I yelled. “But he has a pulse!” The ambulance team put an oxygen mask over his mouth. Then they said, “There’s one more
[i.e., a respirator unit]
. If there’s anyone else in pain, we’ll take them.” So I inhaled a little oxygen, and the crying girl took a good long dose. By the time we had finished there was a media stampede. They surrounded the girl and the poor thing was seen on television all day.
    While I was looking after everyone, I completely forgot my own pain. It was only at the mention of oxygen that it occurred to me, “Come to think of it, I’m breathing funny myself.” Yet at that very moment, I didn’t make a connection between the gas attack and my condition. I was all right, so I had to look after the people who had really suffered. Just what the incident was I didn’t know, but whatever it was it was big. And like I said before, I’d been feeling under the weather since the morning, so I was convinced my feeling a little off was just me.
    In the midst of all this, a colleague from work passed by. He helped me rescue the girl from the clutches of the media. Then he suggested we walk to the office together, so I thought, “Okay, we’ll walk to work.” It takes about thirty minutes on foot from Kasumigaseki to my office. As I was walking, I found it a bit hard to breathe, but not so bad that I had to sit down and rest. I was able to walk.
    When we got to the office, my boss had seen me on TV, and everyone was asking, “Ms. Izumi, are you really okay?” It was already ten o’clock by the time I got to the office. My boss said, “How about resting a bit? You shouldn’t tax yourself,” but I still didn’t reallyunderstand what had happened, so I just got on with my work. After a while a message came from Personnel: “Seems it was poison gas, so if you start to feel ill you’re to report to the hospital immediately.” And just about then my condition was getting worse. So they put me in an ambulance at the Kamiyacho intersection and took me to Azabu Hospital, a small place not far away. Twenty people had gone there already.
    I had coldlike symptoms for a week after that. I had this asthmatic cough, and three days later a high fever, with a temperature of over 40°C [104°F]. I was sure the thermometer was broken. The mercury shot up all the way to the top of the scale. So actually my temperature might have been even higher. All I know is I was completely immobilized.
    Even after the fever resided, the wheezing persisted for about a month; clearly the effects of sarin in my bronchial tubes. It was incredibly painful. I mean, I’d start coughing and never stop. It was so painful I couldn’t breathe. I was coughing all the time. I’d be talking like this and suddenly it would start. In PR you have to meet people, so working under those conditions was really hard.
    And I kept having these dreams. The image of those station attendants with spoons in their mouths stuck in my head. In my dreams, there were hundreds of bodies lying on the ground, row upon row far into the distance. I don’t know how many times I woke in the middle of the night. Frightening.
    As I said, there were people foaming at the mouth where we were, in front of the Ministry of Trade and Industry. That half of the roadway was absolute hell. But on the other side, people were walking to work as usual. I’d be tending to someone and look up to see passersby glance my way with a “what-on-earth’s-happened-here?” expression, but not one came over. It was as if we were a world apart. Nobody stopped. They all thought: “Nothing to do with me.”
    Some guards were standing right before our eyes at the