Typical Day
Pink and blue squiggles squirm in front of Pat's eyes.
It's Ebola! she thinks, as a wave of terror, somehow both thrilling and chilling, hits her. The squiggles slither toward her, dripping some kind of unidentifiable ooze.
No! No! Ebola isn't supposed to do this...it's not supposed to—
But the squiggles, well, squiggle closer, and Pat's heart is suddenly struggling to beat. Her lungs struggle to breathe. One wet, blue squiggle rears up in front of her face like a giant, alien worm. The thing is about to give her a long, juicy slurp, when—
Pat's eyes flutter open to the sight of her cat, Robin Warren, licking her on the nose. Weird dream. Pat gets up and moving, and an hour later she's staring out the cab window on the way to her job in the pathology lab at Beth Israel Hospital. New York City rolls past outside, and she sees (among other things) a laughing produce vendor casually handing a lady a bag of perfect-looking avocados.
I need that guy's job. He looks so relaxed. So carefree. He's not worried about Ebola. Ugh, get a grip, Pat. You can't give in to this hysteria. A few cases in the U.S. does not make an epidemic.
"Good morning, Dr. McAllen," says Dr. Pinsky, a shaft of morning light gleaming off his handsome bespectacled eyes as he and Pat enter the lobby through revolving doors.
Pat is slightly shocked that Pinsky is even giving her the time of day—he's one of the top doctors in the hospital, and certainly acts like he knows it. If he does normal human things around you—like being polite—that means he either respects you...or he wants something.
"Good morning, Dr. Pinsky," she says, doing her best to meet his gaze firmly with her own.
"I sent some blood samples to your lab which require your immediate attention," Dr. Pinsky says. "They're from the patient who recently returned from western Africa."
Oh, great. "Have there been any symptoms of...?"
"Ebola? No, not yet. But we can't be too careful, now can we?" he says, practically over his shoulder as he whisks across the lobby. Pat smiles for a second as she watches him scoot away.
Pat rides up the sleek, silver elevator in the building's lobby, then stands in front of the familiar door of her lab and takes a couple deep breaths before entering.
I hope Lyman's not here yet. I just want a few minutes of peace and qui—
"Top of the mornin', McAllen!" says Dr. Lyman, in a terrible Irish accent. Somewhere in Pat's family tree there must've been somebody who was Irish, but Pat really has no idea. Despite her lack of connection to her name, her fellow pathologist amuses himself every day by talking to her like a leprechaun.
"You've reached the end of the rainbow. But instead of gold, you'll find piles of tissue and blood pressed neatly onto slides."
"Yeah, including a fresh batch from Africa," she mumbles.
Lyman's carefree attitude fades. "You saw Pinsky, huh? It's over there," he says, pointing to some blood samples in a tightly sealed container. "I would've run the tests already, but he said he wanted you to do it. He wants the best—blah, blah, blah."
She lets out an exasperated sigh. "It's ridiculous. There aren't any symptoms at all. This case is supposed to get priority over all the other samples we have piling up just because the media has decided to whip everybody into a frenzy."
"Well, yeah. The threat of bleeding out of your eyeballs does kind of freak people out," quips Lyman.
"It's going to have to wait."
Pat goes about her day with a looming sense of dread. She has about forty other cases to help diagnose, all of which include about ninety slides to examine, so she has plenty of other work to keep her mind off Ebola. But all day as she hunches over her microscope, she feels like those Ebola squiggles from her dreams are creeping up on her.
After lunch Pat spends an hour training a team of brand-new residents on the proper way to affix samples to slides. Or at least, she's halfway through her session when Dr. Pinsky pokes his pointy head into the room. He doesn't say a thing—just gives her a piercing look and cocks one eyebrow.
Withering inside, she mumbles, "Soon." Pinsky's head slowly withdraws from the doorway, his eyes never leaving Pat's.
An hour later Pat's in the middle of presenting her findings to a multidisciplinary team conferring on the best treatment for a patient's breast cancer. She's just put a picture of a particularly nasty-looking growth onto the screen when Pinsky bursts into the room.
"Dr. McAllen, would you mind speaking to me outside for a moment?"
Blushing, Pat replies, "If you don't mind, Dr. Pinsky, we're in the middle of—"
"In the middle of something that's more important than the current national health crisis?"
"Dr. Pinsky, I can't believe you're giving in to all the fear mongering that—"
"If I didn't know any better, Dr. McAllen, I'd say you're the one who's afraid."
Pat feels a room full of eyes bore into to her, and somewhere in the back she hears one of her residents whisper, "Oh, burn."
A half-hour later, Dr. McAllen is looking at the tightly-sealed blood samples through the glare of a plastic eye shield. She feels sweat sliding down her arms under the protective gown and her hot breath steams under the white mask. As she reaches for the samples, it's like she can feel the Ebola squiggles reaching for her.
Enough. You're a doctor. Do your job.
That little burst of reassurance is all it takes, and suddenly it's like someone has slain those squiggles with a claymore.
A little while later, Pat breathes a sigh of relief as the negative test results become clear. When she delivers the news to Pinsky, he almost seems disappointed.
On the way home from work, Pat hikes a few blocks out of her way to the produce stand. The smiling vendor greets her with a familiar wave, even though they'd never met before.
"You work around here, miss?" he asks passingly as he places the last perfect avocado into a smiley face bag.
"I'm a doctor. Beth Israel."
He takes a fearful step back from her. "Whoa, aren't you all way worried about Ebola?"
"Nah," Pat smiles. "There's nothing to worry about, Ebola-wise. And besides, we can handle it."