From as far back as she could remember, Jennifer had always been a positive person. When she first encountered a hospital nurse during her admission for a ruptured appendix, she knew in her heart that she was going to become one, herself—not just a nurse, she decided as she learned more about the profession, but a nurse in a physiologically demanding part of the hospital like the operating room or the ICU.

As it turned out, she fell in love with respiratory physiology and had ended up first working in White Memorial’s medical ICU, and then in the hospital’s new isolation unit. Now, irony of ironies, she was going to die in that very unit—there, or in the operating room like Becca Seabury.

It was crazy. Absolutely crazy. She was young and healthy. She had done absolutely nothing wrong. She was a spiritual person with a deep belief in God, and a commitment to helping those less fortunate than she was. And yet, as things were unfolding, hope was vanishing by the hour.

She tried to shift the position of her arm, which was now the size of a torpedo, but burning, neuritic pain, and swelling from fingers to shoulder prevented her from doing so. Instead, she pressed the button signaling her intravenous infusion pump to send down some more morphine through her peripherally inserted central IV catheter—her PICC line. It was always a surprise to find out she hadn’t yet called for the maximum narcotic the machine would allow. Well, dammit, she deserved the relief.

Jennifer knew she was in trouble just a day after the tragic death of her patient and friend Becca. The cheerleader had gone from a fairly straightforward elbow fracture to a wound infection with a virtually untreatable bacteria, labeled the Doomsday Germ by the press, to the amputation of her arm, to the spread of infection to her other limbs and her heart, and finally, to a fatal cardiac arrest on the operating room table.

That was precisely what Jennifer believed was in store for her.

Looking back now, she knew the Doomsday Germ had already entered her body by the time she stood on a riser in the operating room and witnessed the final chaotic, violent minutes of beautiful Becca’s life. The bacteria—possibly even a single germ, the ID people had told her—had gotten in through an odd little patch of eczema, or a small scrape on her hand, or maybe—irony of ironies—through a scratch caused by taking her engagement diamond on and off for work.

The ring represented Andy Gulli, her fiancé, and Andy represented the answer to her prayers. Handsome, athletic, bright, funny, and caring, he would have been the answer for most girls.