The seventeen-year-old, captain of her school’s championship team, had shattered her elbow in a spectacular fall during the state finals. The violent injury was chronicled on YouTube and immediately went viral, making Becca something of a household name around the globe. A successful reconstruction by Dr. Chandler Beebe, the chief of orthopedics, followed by several days of IV antibiotics, and the conservative decision was made to wait one more day and discharge.

That was when Becca Seabury’s fevers began.

The Landrew Building, less than two years old, was the latest jewel in the expanding crown of White Memorial. The eighth floor featured four negative pressure isolation rooms—airtight spaces except for a gap beneath the door, with a ventilation system that brought more air into the room than it allowed out. By the time a nurse escorted Becca’s family to the waiting area, there were seven in gloves, gowns, and hoods in the spacious room.

Chandler Beebe, six-foot-six, towered over the rest.

Nearly lost among them, motionless on her back, was a pale, fair-skinned young woman, with hair the color of spun gold. Her lips were dry and cracked and the flush in her cheeks looked anything but healthy. An IV with a piggybacked plastic bag of meds was draining into her good arm. The temperature reading on her chart was 102.5 degrees. It had been as high as 104. Her blood pressure was 85/50.

Chandler Beebe, once a guard for the Harvard University basketball team, was generally unflappable. Now, beneath his mask and hood, he was nearly as pale as his patient. It was the smell, he knew, that was getting to him. Despite his years operating in war zones and medical missions to third-world countries, he had never been fully able to accustom himself to the odor of pus and of rotting flesh. Glancing at the monitor, with a nurse holding up Becca’s arm, he began unwrapping the gauze he had placed around it eight hours before. Beebe had two teenagers himself, a boy and a girl, both athletes and excellent students, and as brave and well-adjusted as this girl. But he couldn’t get his mind around the image of either of them being at the crossroads of decisions like this one.

The progressive layers of bandage as they were removed were first damp with bloody drainage, then soaked. The ooze, from eight inches of filleted incision, reeked of untreated bacterial growth. The color of the flesh darkened. Twelve days before, Beebe and a surgical colleague had reopened the incision he had made when he did the initial, meticulous reconstruction. The infection had come on with the speed and ferocity of a Panzer attack. Fever, shaking chills, new swelling, intense pain, dehydration, blood pressure drop. Signs of infection in an enclosed space. There was no choice that day. The incision had to be opened, debrided, irrigated, and drained.

Now, it was time for another decision.