The Judas Virus

by Don Donaldson

  Maybe that old injury helped bring on the headaches. Whatever it was, he could already feel the pills working. But he still wanted that blonde.

  WAYNE WAS DISCHARGED from the hospital at 6 p.m. Monday evening. When Chris came to get him, she found Mary Beth Cummings at the nurses’ station staring at her right hand, lightly stroking her little finger. Seeing Chris, she held her hand up, palm out, and slowly moved her little finger back and forth.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I haven’t been able to do that for three years, ever since a glass vase I was washing shattered and cut my hand.” She stroked both sides of her little finger with the index finger of her other hand. “And I can feel that . . . not to a normal degree, but the sensation is definitely returning.”

  Then, realizing she was running on about something Chris was probably not interested in, she said, “Sorry, I’m just excited and surprised that after all this time . . .”

  “No need to apologize,” Chris said. “I’d be excited, too.”

  Wayne joined them from his room, fully dressed and carrying the overnight bag he’d brought. He was still thin, but he looked a lot better than when Chris first saw him in her office, his jaundice almost gone and his belly no longer protruding.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. Then to Mary Beth, “That’s no reflection on you. You’ve done a fine job, and I’ll always be grateful.”

  Mary Beth took hold of a nearby wheelchair and pushed it over to him. “Now I get to take you for a ride to the front door.”

  “I can walk.”

  “Hospital policy,” she said firmly.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Chris slid into the driver’s seat and started her car.

  “I can’t believe how much better I’m feeling,” Wayne said.

  “I’m glad it’s working out so well,” Chris replied, backing out of her parking space.

  “The worst part after the surgery was everybody being so covered up when they came in my room, like I was something to be feared. It does things to your mind.”

  Neither of them spoke again until they were out of the parking lot and onto the highway. Then Chris said, “When I was talking with Dr. Boyer a few days ago, he said something that surprised me. It wasn’t possible for me to give you part of my liver. You needed more tissue than I could supply.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Just so you’d know.”

  “Have you eaten yet?”

  “No.”

  “I’m dying for a burger and fries. What do you say?”

  “I’m sure that wouldn’t be Dr. Boyer’s choice for you, but after what you’ve been through, why not? But starting tomorrow, that kind of meal is off limits. There’s a woman in my apartment building that loves to cook, but she’s widowed and doesn’t have any kids. I’ve contracted with her to cook for us during the time you’ll be staying with me. I don’t eat much in the morning, so you’ll have to shift for yourself then. I’ve got plenty of everything on hand. You’ll go to her apartment for lunch, and she’ll make dinner for us in mine.”

  “So we’ll be eating dinner together, you and I?”

  “Unless something comes up that prevents me from being there.”

  “Is that likely to happen?”

  “I really can’t say.”

  “Let me do it. You might not believe this, but I’m a great cook myself.”

  “You’d need to shop for groceries and get them upstairs. You shouldn’t be doing that. It’s too much so soon after your surgery.”

  “There must be a store that delivers.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just let me take care of it. I want to. Don’t make an invalid of me.”

  “All right. We’ll do it your way.”

  THE CRY OF seagulls and the sound of ocean waves caressing a rocky beach filled the room. Dominic Barroso turned from his stomach onto his back, but remained asleep until the loons began calling. He always woke with the first loon call. Maybe because it was so spooky.

  He sat up, shifted his legs over the side of the bed, and turned off the tape he used for an alarm clock. When Ginny was working the third shift, he always rose at 8 a.m. so he could have a nice breakfast waiting for her when she got home. They didn’t live far from Monteagle, but because of the traffic, it would take her an hour to make the trip, just enough time for him to shower, dress, get his joints oiled up, and prepare something nice to eat.

  He reached for his cane and got up, as usual, putting most of his weight on his good leg, “good” being a euphemism for the leg not as screwed up as the really bad one.

  He hadn’t taken more than three steps when he realized that his legs were feeling pretty good today. He took a few more steps. Pretty good, hell. They were feeling great.

  THAT SAME MORNING, while Chris was making rounds, her mind kept coming back to what her father’s nurse had said about movement and sensation returning in her little finger; nothing for three years, then, while taking care of a patient whose incision heals far faster than normal, she too, experiences an unusual therapeutic event.

  Interesting.

  The epidemiologist part of her kept pecking at those facts. As a result, a little before eleven o’clock, she factored in her father’s odd symptoms the night she and Michael had come back to the hospital. That led her to a possible chain of events so strange she banished it from her thoughts.

  She spent the early part of the afternoon reviewing all incidences of hospital-acquired infections for the past two weeks, looking for any patterns she should be aware of. Then the scenario she’d dispatched from her thoughts that morning crept back into them.

  After briefly debating with herself about whether she should follow up on this, she reached for the phone.

  The woman’s name was Mary Beth Cummings. Chris remembered that from seeing it on her name tag. But would the hospital give out her home phone number?

  It turned out they would, but reluctantly, and only after Chris explained to three people that she was a member of Michael’s transplant team and had been seeing patients there as part of her infectious disease practice for over a year.

  Her call to the Cummings home, however, produced only Mary Beth’s answering machine. Chris left her name and number and turned her attention to other matters.

  At four fifteen, Mary Beth returned her call.

  “Thanks for getting back to me. I’m sure you remember the rash and the other symptoms my father had the night you called Dr. Boyer and we came back to the hospital. Since that night, have you ever had the same symptoms?”

  “No. Under the circumstances, I certainly would have mentioned it to Dr. Boyer if I had. Why do you ask? Did anyone else have them?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Do you think there’s a problem? Your father seems very healthy now.”

  “There’s nothing to be concerned about. I was just curious.”

  “If that’s all then, I have to leave for work.”

  “Okay. Have a good shift.”

  So that’s it, Chris thought, hanging up. It was a crazy idea. Now she even felt a little foolish for having made the call.

  Then the phone rang again.

  “This is Dr. Collins.”

  “Mary Beth here. I just remembered . . . Wednesday night, when Ginny Barroso, the third-shift nurse who’d been taking care of your father, came to relieve me, she told me that starting Thursday, she was going back to work in the regular ICU. When I ran into her on Friday before her shift started, just to make conversation, I asked her how it felt to be back in the regular trenches. She said she didn’t know because she’d been sick Thursday. She seemed fine when we spoke on Friday, so she couldn’t have been too sick.”

  This information greatly piqued Chris’s interest. “I appr
eciate you telling me this.”

  Having established her credibility earlier with the guardians of the Monteagle staff’s privacy, they gave Chris Ginny’s number without a scuffle.

  Eagerly, she made the call. Busy . . . A few fidgety minutes later, she tried again, with the same result. Too curious to wait until the Barrosos’ line was clear, she started thinking about who else might be able to tell her what was wrong with Ginny the night she was ill. Surely Ginny had reported her illness to her supervisor the night she hadn’t come to work.

  After another round of phone calls, Chris had Valerie Pettis on the line. She identified herself, then asked, “Do you recall the night last week when your regular third-shift nurse taking care of my father didn’t come to work because she was ill?”

  “I remember.”

  “Did you discuss with her what was wrong?”

  “She said she had a rash and a cough.”

  “And you didn’t tell us about it?”

  “I did tell Dr. Boyer.”

  “You specifically spoke about the rash and the cough?”

  “Now that you put it that way, maybe not. As I recall, the conversation shifted quickly to Ginny’s replacement and whether she was up to speed on the isolation protocols. Is something wrong?”

  “I’m not sure. But thanks for the information.”

  As Chris was about to try the Barrosos’ number again, the phone rang. It was Wayne.

  “I’m planning dinner for six o’clock,” he said. “You’ll be here, won’t you?”

  Of all the times to be constrained by this, Chris thought. She wanted to be free to pursue the disturbing facts she’d just learned.

  “It’s going to be wonderful,” Wayne said. “Salmon over linguini, new potatoes in a dill sauce.”

  The dinner seemed so important to him that, despite her own wishes, she said, “I’ll be there.”

  She tried the Barroso number twice more without success before leaving the office. So Ginny’s brief illness was still on her mind when she arrived home.

  Wayne had not exaggerated his culinary skills and had produced a dinner that deserved the compliments Chris paid him. Their conversation during dinner was polite and civilized and strained. When she wasn’t expressing anger at him, it seemed that Chris had nothing else to say. Over the years, she had often imagined what it would be like to have a father. Now that she did, she didn’t know what to do with him. And she still didn’t trust him.

  After dinner, she helped clean up, then excused herself and headed for the phone in her bedroom. This time when she called the Barrosos, a man answered.

  “Ginny Barroso, please.”

  “I’m sorry, but she’s asleep.”

  “This is Dr. Collins. I’m a member of Dr. Boyer’s transplant team at Monteagle Hospital. Ginny took care of one of our patients last week, and I heard that on Thursday she called in sick. What was the nature of her illness?”

  “She had a rash and a slight fever and was also coughing. She didn’t want to give her patients anything, so she stayed home.”

  “How’s she feeling now?”

  “Fine.”

  “Better than usual in any way?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Has she had any long-term health problems that have recently improved?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  While Chris was assimilating this information and wondering what else she should ask, the man added, “You should have asked that question about me.”

  “Why?”

  “For years, arthritis has been eating away at my knees. Messed up one so bad they said I needed an artificial replacement. Couldn’t walk without a cane. But I’m sitting here now looking at my cane on the other side of the room.”

  “You’re saying . . .”

  “Didn’t use it at all yesterday or today. I don’t know what’s going on, or how long it’ll last, but my knees are better.”

  “This rash,” Chris said, her mind reeling. “Did you get it too?”

  “The night after Ginny did.”

  Chapter 9

  “MICHAEL, IT’S CHRIS. I think we have a problem.”

  She told him what she’d learned about Mary Beth, Ginny, and Ginny’s husband. “I don’t know at this point if it all originated with my father’s transplant, but I suspect it did.”

  “Jesus.” Then there was silence on Michael’s end of the line.

  “Michael, are you still there?”

  “I’m just trying to absorb what you’ve said. How could this have happened? We took precautions.”

  “Apparently, they weren’t good enough.”

  “Let’s say it did come from the transplant. How much trouble are we in? I mean, the illness conveyed was very minimal, and now they’re all feeling fine . . . better than fine.”

  “That’s the case today, but who knows what’ll happen down the line. We’re in uncharted waters here.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “First, we have to determine the extent of this. All hospital staff will have to be questioned to see who else might have recently experienced the same symptoms. We should set the time frame as the last two weeks. If we find any cases that occurred before the transplant, we’ll know it didn’t start there. Since the symptoms were so minor and lasted such a short time, if they occurred at night, they might not have been noticed. I think that’s what happened with Mary Beth Cummings. But we’ll just have to live with that constraint.”

  “So maybe we were infected too and just don’t know it?”

  “I can’t say, but it seems possible.”

  “Then we could be spreading it even now.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  “What do we do till we find out, quarantine ourselves?”

  “Until we get a handle on this, you shouldn’t do any surgery, and I’m not going to see any patients. To alter our lives any more than that at this stage would be overreacting.”

  “What about your father?”

  “I’m going to ask him to stay in the house until we learn more. Monteagle doesn’t have a medical director of infection control, but the IC office must still be staffed.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “I’d like to get started tonight canvassing the hospital staff. There’s probably no one in the IC office now, but we need to get someone to come in to help us. Can you take care of that?”

  “I’ll get right on it. Are you going over there now?”

  “As soon as I hang up.”

  “I’ll meet you in my office.”

  “Do you have Eric Ash’s home phone number?”

  “Why are we calling him?”

  “If the evidence points to my father as the index case of the symptoms we’re concerned about, I’ll be wanting all my father’s stored blood samples and the blood of everyone who came in contact with him at the hospital tested for pig retrovirus. And I want to be sure Ash has the necessary reagents on hand. The earlier he knows that, the better.”

  “Just how open are we going to be about why we’re questioning the staff?”

  “While we don’t know what we’re dealing with, we’re going to be evasive and vague.”

  WITH CHRIS STANDING on one side of him and Sidney Knox on the other, Michael looked around the conference room to see if everyone was there. Thirty-nine busy hours had passed since Chris had told him that the pig virus in her father’s liver had apparently infected several people. It was now time to explain matters to the transplant team and the appropriate members of the administration.

  “Something’s going on,” Eric Ash said in a hushed voice as he joined Michael’s group.

  “What do you mean?” Michael asked.

  Ash looked across the room, where John Scot
t, Monteagle’s CEO, was talking to Norman Stewart, the medical director, and Carter Dewitt, VP for financial affairs. “Scott himself called me first thing this morning and asked me about the results on those blood samples. When I told him what I’d found, he said I was to divide all the samples from your father and put half of each one in a separate tube labeled with his name and the date they were drawn. Thirty minutes ago, Carter Dewitt came to my lab and picked them up.”

  “Dewitt,” Michael exclaimed. “What’s he doing handling blood samples?”

  “And I also heard that Scott brought Dominic Barroso, the husband of the infected nurse, in for an arthroscopic knee examination.”

  “That is odd,” Michael said. “What did they find?”

  “I’d been trying to learn that ever since I heard about it, but hadn’t been able to get in touch with the orthopod who did it until just a few minutes ago. Before this guy Barroso became infected, he had almost no articular cartilage left in his knee. Now it’s completely regenerated.”

  “That’s incredible,” Sidney Knox said.

  At that moment, the two men they were waiting for, Henry Bechtel, VP for legal affairs, and Chuck Alford, head of public relations, arrived.

  “Okay, everyone, we’re all here now,” Michael announced. “So let’s begin.”

  When the transplant team and everyone else had found seats around the big conference table, he said, “I think most of you are aware that we’ve experienced something unexpected with our first pig-to-human transplant. I’ve called this meeting to bring everyone up to date. Shortly after receiving—”

  “Dr. Boyer, I’m sorry to interrupt,” John Scott, the CEO, said.

  Scott was known around the hospital as the great white shark—the white part of that appellation coming from his prematurely silver hair and beard, the shark part, from his cold black eyes.

  “I’d like you to be as accurate as possible in what you tell us,” Scott said. “And the phrase ‘shortly after’ isn’t consistent with that wish.”

  “Of course.” Michael briefly consulted the notes he’d brought, then continued. “Our first patient, Mr. Wayne Collins, received his transplant on the morning of the eleventh, a Monday. On Tuesday evening, I was called by the second-shift nurse caring for Mr. Collins and told that he had a slight fever and a rash. Dr. Chris Collins”—Michael looked at Chris—“the patient’s daughter, who serves our team as its infectious disease specialist, and I returned to the hospital and examined Mr. Collins. We ordered a CBC and a diff count, which came back normal. Because of that and the minor nature of the symptoms, we decided to watch and wait.”