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I might have thought Cassie was offended, but the exaggerated way she clasped her hand over her heart showed she was teasing me. “You’re the platinum member, Hardcastle,” she said. “You’re buying.”
“Every day,” I promised.
The banter was just enough to make it not awkward—or less awkward—when she had to wait outside the pop-up decontamination shower in my office doorway and collect my clothes. She kept it casual as I gowned up—not in a surgical gown, but two hospital gowns, one backward and one forward, although they were still a bit short. Good thing I hadn’t skipped leg day.
“Sorry,” she said as I stepped out into the mobile containment unit they’d set up outside my office door. There was barely room for the two of us, especially with the hazmat suit. “Clearly your donation dollars have a lot of work to do with patient gowns.”
“I’ll put a note in my check’s memo line.”
“Are you claustrophobic?” Cassie changed the subject abruptly.
“No?” Unless I was in a small, enclosed space with one of my family members.
A cleanup crew member joined us, unzipping a red duffel bag. They unfolded a large tube of red and clear plastic. “Your chariot, sir.”
Oh. Boy. “What, no first class?”
Cassie shot me a wry look through her hazmat suit’s window. “Sorry, the suits vent into the environment.”
Right. I couldn’t be allowed to exhale heaven only knew what while I was being taken—where?
“Admit it,” Cassie said, “you’ve always dreamed of having peons haul your litter around.”
The humor kept me grounded in the present. One panic attack at a time. “Dreamed of?” I countered. “How do you think I get to work every day?”
Cassie had to step out to allow us the space to lay out the isolation tube. At least I’d be able to see out of the clear plastic front. As long as I didn’t focus on the small space or the numbers of tubes and filters that protected the outside world from me, it was going to be a breeze to lay down in this six-foot cylinder to be toted around.
I glanced up to where Cassie had retreated, back inside my office. She gave me a little nod.
I could do this. Cassie was an infectious disease fellow. She wasn’t going to let me die.
I lay down in the tube and let the cleanup crew secure me. I wasn’t claustrophobic, especially not when I could see out—but I was learning I was very, very afraid of a terrible death by bacteria, virus or toxin.
My projects all last year had been updating the Napa County biologic emergency information sheets. As the cleanup crew lifted the litter, the biowarfare agent table streamed through my mind again.
Anthrax. Plague. Botulism—no, that required food and water. Not tularemia either. But smallpox. Brucellosis. Q fever. Mycotoxins. Ricin.
The tube landed on a waiting gurney, jolting me from my rampant thoughts. “Sorry, sir.” Cassie had to raise her voice even more to be heard through both of our PPE. “You know how hard it is to find good help these days.”
I nodded and tried to keep my breathing steady. Was this shortness of breath the early effects of that powder or just panic?
The gurney began rolling, and I watched the fluorescent lights stream by overhead.
If it were ricin, I’d already be dead. And arsenic and cyanide. Well, I could have been exposed to a sublethal dose. We really only worried about mass poisoning events in public health, but didn’t that cause... lung problems? A lot of these did, especially if inhaled.
As if triggered by the thought, my breath caught in my chest. There wasn’t enough air in this tube. For half a second, I was a little boy again, alone in a hospital on the other side of the world from his parents—or at least the few staff members who cared about me—struggling to breathe.
At my feet, Cassie adjusted something on the isolation unit tubing and cool air began to flow again.
I kept my eyes on her through the surprisingly disorienting ride and its various bumps and turns. I’d walked these halls for more than a month, but I had no idea where we were.
But Cassie was still here. So I was going to be okay.
I hoped.
The walk to Infectious Disease had never felt this long from anywhere in the hospital, let alone a unit on the same floor. I glanced down at Davis again; his wide blue eyes fixed on mine like I was a lighthouse leading him through treacherous territory. I had to keep him calm, and to keep him calm, I had to maintain my own perfect peace and pretend the sweat already running down my back was just from wearing the hazmat suit. I reminded myself to keep my breathing even and slow to conserve a limited amount of air.
For all my confidence, I had no idea what was going to happen to Davis, but I couldn’t let him panic. I patted the containment unit, so many layers of PPE between us that I could only hope the comfort connected.
