Marissa watched him inject the drug into the side port of her IV. Then she rolled her head straight. Now that the egg retrieval was about to begin, her attitude about the procedure had changed from fifteen minutes earlier. She was no longer ambivalent.

As the Valium hit her system, Marissa’s mind calmed, but she didn’t sleep. She dwelt on the thought of her blocked tubes and what might have caused the blockage. Then she began to consider the different procedures she had undergone. She remembered how she felt waking up from the general anesthesia after her laparoscopy.

As soon as she was lucid, Dr. Carpenter had told her that her tubes appeared so scarred that microsurgery was totally out of the question. He said that all he’d been able to do was take a biopsy. He let her know then that her only chance for a baby was in-vitro fertilization.

“Are we ready?” a booming voice called.

Marissa lifted her head, raised heavy eyelids, and looked up at the bearded face of Dr. Wingate. Lying back, she tried to dissociate herself from her body to cope with her anxiety. Her mind wandered back to her visit to Dr. Ken Mueller in the department of pathology at the Memorial after her laparoscopy. The Women’s Clinic frequently sent some of their specimens to the Memorial to confirm their diagnoses. Marissa had been told that her fallopian tube biopsy had been forwarded there.

Hoping to maintain her anonymity, Marissa had searched for her slides herself. She knew that the Women’s Clinic used her social security number as her case number.

Once Marissa had the slides, she sought out Ken. They’d been friends since medical school. She asked him to look at the microscopic sections for her, but didn’t say they were hers.

“Very interesting,” Ken said after a brief scan of the first slide. He sat back from the microscope. “What can you tell me about the case?”

“Nothing,” Marissa said. “I don’t want to influence you. Tell me what you see.”

“Sort of a quiz, huh?” Ken said with a smile.

“In a way,” Marissa said.

Ken went back to the microscope. “My first guess is that it’s a section of fallopian tube. It looks as if it’s been totally destroyed by an infectious process.”

“Right on,” Marissa said with admiration. “What can you say about the infection?”

For a few minutes Ken silently scanned the specimen. When he finally spoke, Marissa was stunned. “TB!” he announced, folding his arms.

“Tuberculosis?” Marissa almost fell off her chair. She’d expected nonspecific inflammation, never TB. “What makes you say that?” she asked.

“Look in the field,” Ken told her.

Marissa gazed into the scope.