Someone dressed from head to toe in mask and gown walked up to her bedside. Only when he spoke did Mallek recognize him as the ponytailed doctor. “Angie, we’ve got to drain your abscess,” Gayle explained to the teenager but got only yelps in response.

Gayle instructed a similarly garbed nurse to inject two different drugs, which Mallek assumed were sedatives, because the patient stilled within a minute and only the odd groan emerged from her lips. Then Dr. Gayle prepared a surgical tray by the girl’s knee.

None of the staff noticed the gap between the curtains. Mallek was too riveted by the unfolding drama to mention anything. When Gayle pulled a stool up to the girl’s knee, Mallek realized he would have a bird’s-eye view of the impending procedure on her thigh.

Forgetting all his earlier impatience, Mallek—a devout fan of the Operation show on The Health Network—watched transfixed as Dr. Gayle swabbed at the swollen thigh. Gently bending his painful knee, Mallek shuffled himself sideways on the stretcher and leaned forward for a better view.

Mallek flinched when Gayle buried the long needle into the top edge of the girl’s abscess. The injection provoked a muted cry and a twitch from her before she fell back on the bed. Then the doctor reached for a gray scalpel that looked to Mallek like a box cutter. Holding the scalpel as if it were a pen, Gayle placed it against the skin over the center of the bull’s-eye and pressed down.

The moment the blade sliced the skin, the abscess erupted. Yellow pus shot out from the wound and sprayed like a water fountain with a thumb pressed over its nozzle.

Mallek was so stunned by the unexpected jet of pus and the way the doctor jerked back and almost fell off his stool that he didn’t immediately notice he’d been sprayed. It wasn’t until he felt the wetness at his cheek that he realized a drop of pus was running down his face.

3 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

3

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

From the forty-sixth floor of the forty-seven-story building, Dr. Ellen Horton stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Had she squinted, she might have been able to make out the figures of the rush-hour crowds scurrying along Walnut Street below. But her gaze never shifted from the tinted windows of the matching monstrosity across the street, as she forced herself to think of anything but her impending presentation to SeptoMed’s board of directors.

I don’t belong here, Horton thought as she smoothed the front of her pinstriped jacket and matching skirt. Fondly, she recalled the casualness of university meetings. At those functions, she would have been far more likely to see T-shirts and track pants than the ties and jackets that were the rule at SeptoMed. The indifference to fashion was only one of many things she missed about the academic world she had left behind.