Let me introduce myself, my name is Dr. James Daniels and this is my story of how I saved the lives of many people. I remember waking up that morning to the first unknown cause of death we had at the hospital. It started out like any other morning, getting up at six o’clock for my shift at the hospital and then starting the rounds to see all my patients. At the time, I had no idea that a day starting out like any other would change the course of the human population as we knew it. A forty four year old male with a collapsed lung and failure to his major organs came into the Emergency Room. The surgeons took the man into surgery, but could not save him. Whatever it was it seemed to have attacked his entire body. At first, a few of my coworkers and I believed it had to have been a bacterial infection possibly contracted from a trip out of the United States that this man had taken. But after several more days, hundreds of other cases had been reported of patients dying rapidly from the same issue. It was time to look at the man’s labs and charts again for anything that could tell us more about what could be infecting these people. Nothing on his charts showed up as a red flag. To me, this meant that I had either overlooked the cause of death or it was due to a new and undetectable virus. As more and more outbreaks occurred almost everywhere, it appeared uncontained no matter what precautions were taken. This phantom virus was killing thousands of people every twenty-four hours. Every hospital in the United States was full. The hospital where I worked was so crowded that we had to stop taking in new patients. The virus was spreading so fast, that by the fifth day no one was coming to the hospital anymore in fear of catching the virus. Seven days, only one week after the first reported death, the phantom virus had left only me, a thirty five year old woman, on life support, and teenage boy whose body was also infected at the hospital. But Charlie, the teenage boy, reacted to the virus quite differently; his organs were deteriorating at a drastically slower rate. As for me, I still had not shown any signs of the virus even though I was one of the first people to come in contact with patient “zero”.
The air was thick and chemical infested; I could hardly breathe. This was the first time I had stepped foot outside of the hospital in three weeks. Looking around, I saw people dead on the streets and cars upside down in the middle of the road. All I could think was “Is this the end?” I realized in that moment how alone I really was, left to take care of a hopeless woman and a hopeful boy. So many questions were running through my head such as, “how is it that I do not have this virus yet? How does this virus spread? What caused this outbreak of something new, never before seen attacking the human body?” I was determined to find the answers because alone or not, I was what appeared to be the only hope of human life. I was lucky to know the hospital like the back of my hand, meaning I would be capable of surviving there with all the lab and research facilities for a long time, if I needed to. I knew I had to go back to the beginning of the epidemic, the first sign of the virus, in order to find the cure.

The teenage boy, Charlie, was more active today than he had been the past week but his labs showed signs that more of his major organs were beginning to fail, especially his lungs. “Hi Charlie, how are you feeling today”, I said as I looked over his latest labs. Charlie sat up with a smile on his face saying “morning Dr. Daniels, I’m feeling better now than I have felt the last few days”. Charlie lost his whole family to the virus and struggled to hold on by himself. At this point in my research, I had no idea why the virus was acting differently in Charlie’s body than in everyone else’s. I was especially dumbfounded with my own body’s reaction. How was it that I was one of the last men still standing, out of a city of thirty thousand after only one week had passed. After pondering this illness for days, I knew there was only one way that this many people could have been infected in such a short amount of time. The tests I had been running on Charlie and the Jane Doe woman proved my findings true. The virus had to be airborne; it’s the only reason why the lungs of both my patients could have started deteriorating. And there was no other way that this one forty four year old man with major organ damage could have infected millions, other than from a pathogen spreading through air. With just one single breath you were infected with the fatal virus. Somehow, both my immune system and Charlie’s found a way to slow the pathogen from shutting down every major organ in our bodies; in my case it block the pathogen all together.

Each day that went by, I got closer and closer to tracing the virus back to its developmental stages, determining that it could not have gotten into the human body any way other than through digestion. I sat next to the Jane Doe woman on life support, who came into the hospital emergency room with the first wave of people infected by this virus. I had been slowly watching her organs fail, just like Charlie’s, only his immune system had been able to fight off the deterioration longer than hers. I studied how the body reacted to the virus at certain stages and racked my brain to figure out how an airborne pathogen could be the cause of humans dying from major organ failure. Until one day, as I walked into Jane Doe’s ICU room, I smelled the same smell from outside, like the smell of rotting and dying flesh. Suddenly, I realized the pathogen was getting to the air from our lungs. Then virus was causing deterioration in the lungs and other organ in the body. From the minute an infected person’s lungs started to deteriorate they began contaminating the air with the contagious pathogen. In my mind, I had figured it out! But in reality, I had not even come close to solving the problem, finding a vaccine or coming up with a solution to stop the virus from getting into the air. Then I thought, what if you could be hooked up to a breathing machine long enough for survivors to find a vaccine before the harmful particles from the lungs could get into the oxygen supply. I knew right then that without a doubt there was hope for people who did not already have the virus. That is, if there was anyone even left out there.

Although it looked as though Charlie was getting better, his lungs and other vital organs were dying faster and faster from the look of his labs. With the labs changing so rapidly it gave me more of a chance to find the virus using Charlie’s cells. Before then, the virus had been undetectable. It was silent in the body other than the obvious major organ failure. But the faster the virus was attacking the body, the more room was left for error. In a way, the virus was camouflaged in your body’s own cells. I knew where to look for the cells of the virus, how to detect them in the labs and how to run tests at the hospital. All the while Charlie was getting worse and at that moment I had nothing to give him that would help. I hugged him tight and said “You know it is because of you that human life still has a chance, right?” He looked at me with tears in his eyes and whispered “No Dr. Daniels it’s because of you. Thank you for everything you have done”. It was not until right then that I realized how blessed I really was to have the resources available at the hospital and knowledge about diseases. Not only find this phantom virus, but to try my best at putting together a vaccine. The hope would be to make Charlie’s immune system keep on living with the virus. Unfortunately, in my opinion Charlie did not have that kind of time. At that point, he might have had a day left due to the rate his organs were dying. It was clear that Charlie knew this and excepted it, knowing that he had been a huge influence in my progress at stopping the epidemic. My next mystery was to find or localize the virus and remove the pathogen from the air. If successful, then I can create a specific vaccine for any person infected or yet to be.

A month after Charlie died I was very close to testing the vaccine. I had created it to attack the virus in the body, containing it before the virus progressed once someone was infected. Jane Doe was the only person left in the hospital other than me. It had been weeks since I had spoken to anyone or eaten solid food, not canned. But the day had come and I was planning to run my first test of the vaccine on the Jane Doe woman. I remember it was a stressful day for me because if this test did not work, I was out of research materials for the lab equipment. Fear came over me every day that whatever it was keeping me immune to this virus would stop. If it were to stop, I would have never been able to finish the testing of my vaccine. The fact that I was still alive, at this point in the epidemic, after breathing the same infected air everyone else had confused me to no end. Being a doctor and a scientist, this once in a lifetime chance that had now become my life was unbelievable to me. I believe in what I can see, test, and prove. So in my eyes, this was impossible. I was running tests on my body everyday to be positive I was still uninfected. However, being immune to the pathogen in the air lead me to the day where I tested the vaccine. Testing the vaccine on Jane Doe would show if it could control or even stop the symptoms of the virus in her body.

Three days prior to administering the vaccine into the Jane Doe woman’s blood stream, I was seeing signs that the progression of the deteriorating organs was stopping. She had also been breathing clean air through the breathing device I had created for the prevention of the virus spreading any further. At that point, it seemed as though the vaccine was controlling the virus infecting her. Seeing her progress that quickly was the best sign I could have seen. It meant that the vaccine would most likely continue to work. I observed Jane Doe for weeks to be absolutely sure that the first test of the vaccine was a success. Even though it seemed to be working early on in the testing, I had to be positive it worked before I could give it to anyone else. Through all of the tests and labs the Jane Doe woman was still in a vegetative state on life support. She was completely brain dead meaning there was no chance she would ever wake up. The machines were controlling all of her normal bodily functions for her. Essentially, the machines and my vaccine were the only things keeping her alive. The time had come for me to let her go by unplugging the machines.

At the time, I wanted the Jane Doe woman, who was my only companion through these last few months or so, to pass away in peace. No more wires and no more tubes keeping her breathing. As her breathing slowed I heard a slight cough on her final breath. I wished I could have done as much for her as she did for me. She gave me the confirmation of my success in creating a vaccine to control and contain the virus in the body. I now had the confidence I needed to leave the hospital in search of survivors. It was time for me to leave so that I could give others a real chance of survival instead of an inevitable death. I left armed with as much of the vaccine as I could, given the materials remaining in the lab. I also packed prevention breathing devices that I planned to have people wear twenty-four hours a day. There was nothing left for me here at the hospital. Even though the fear of what the outside world had turned into felt like it would eat me alive, I had to face it head on. I was ready and the only person left equipped for the job. The fate and lives of millions depended on it.