Maybe it was the golden jaguar that Daniel had lost. Or maybe it was something even more valuable.

Anyhow, after a quick flight back to La Paz, Andy, Darnell, Gina, and I spent two nights at the Hotel Presidente where the remainder of the expedition team was also staying.

I was surprised when we walked through the hotel entrance and found Libby waiting in the lobby. When Andy came through the doors, she ran to him and pulled him into a tight hug.

Couldn’t say I saw that coming.

Good for him.

Gina and I made haste to Jonathan Roth’s hotel room, which he wouldn’t be needing. After a long shower, then some adult hugging, we curled up on the king bed and slept for twelve straight hours.

We spent the next day ordering room service and sleeping more, then we boarded the charter flight back to Miami, which had already been paid for.

In Miami, Gina and I said goodbye to Libby and Andy. But we hadn’t seen the last of them.

Yes, we.

The clinic where Gina had worked two years earlier was in desperate need of a general practitioner, and after spending nearly all of September getting reacquainted—very well reacquainted—with each other’s bodies, Gina returned to work in early October.

Two weeks in, Gina came home from work and said that she had two different patients during the day who were most likely suffering from autoimmune disease.

On that topic, the superbacteria, or autobiotic, that Daniel discovered had successfully made its way back to the States. (Nathan Buxton included its discovery in his National Geographic article that came out in mid-October, and the term autobiotic had been trending on Twitter for the past few months.) Daniel and Belippa had been testing the bacteria, which Daniel named Bacillus trishellae after his mother, Trisha, on animals and they were moving into human trials in the next few months. And astonishingly enough, Patrick, Daniel, and Belippa were sharing all their proprietary research with other pharmaceutical companies.

True to his word, Patrick cut drug costs across the board at Belippa by more than 500 percent. He lobbied for other pharmaceutical companies to do the same, and surprisingly, a few of them did. He was also pushing for fair drug-pricing legislation in Washington, DC.

That November, I received a package in the mail from Patrick Sewall.

Inside were three large containers of what looked like vitamin gummies. But they weren’t. They were the first autobiotics. Attached was a note:

These are the first autobiotics off the line. Won’t be FDA approved for another year, but I wanted to get some to your sister. Thanks again for saving my sorry ass. Best to Gina.

—Patrick

I shipped them to Lacy the next day.

Six weeks later, when Lacy went to her neurologist’s office, for the first time in seven years she had a negative ANA test.