Chapter Ten
Two days later ...
Thirty-one patients had dwindled to twenty-six in approximately fifty hours, or a little more than two days according to the station's clock. The most critical patients had died from a combination of renal failure and the fever's effect on the brain. Other victims of the disease had taken their places in sickbay, which was being used as an intensive care area. The medical team, primarily due to their constant exposure, was beginning to exhibit early symptoms of contracting the virus, despite the fact that Doctor Zeller was keeping all of them pumped full of Anaprovalin and other substances to keep the illness at bay. It simply wasn't working. Nothing was working.
The long hours and difficult conditions were beginning to take their toll on the doctor. She occasionally reminded herself that falling victim of fatigue and thereby providing an already weakened host to the virus was not an acceptable course of action. The friendly lieutenant who had greeted her upon arrival had become one of her most critical patients in a few days' time because of those factors. Members of her own staff were dividing their time between tending patients and running the station with the help of automated systems and the Enterprise. Astrid was well aware of the hopeless look in the eyes of some of them. They didn't believe that they would be going home, going back to their star ship, alive.
But then there was her personal aid, Crewman Elizabeth Cutler, who was a pillar of strength to her crew mates, despite her own misgivings and fears. Zeller could see through the veneer of confidence, but not without acknowledging how brave the young woman was. Two days had been long enough to make Zeller realize that for all her gaping inadequacies, Cutler was one of the best crewmen to have around in a crisis. She had seen the ravages of disease before, on some distant and unimportant planet called Valakia, and she was not afraid. Zeller had a certain grudging respect for that. Of course, she knew that Cutler had a hand-held communications devise, which she used to keep in contact with Phlox, but that did not diminish her respect. Everyone needed an anchor, even if that anchor was an alien.
The chief medical officer of the Enterprise had become something of a nuisance to Zeller, although she did not doubt that the feeling was mutual. He had a strange theory that the illness was one native to earth and had somehow found its way into space. Granted, her research on widely known alien ailments had turned up nothing, but Phlox was truly going out on a limb to suggest the humans had carried a plague into space with them. The idea troubled Zeller profoundly, but most viruses native to earth could not stand up to the various medicines she had given her patients. She could not name a single common infectious disease that was not snuffed out with a simple treatment of Anaprovalin, much less tryptophan-lysine distillates. But she did acknowledge privately that they medicines were discovered long after the era of epidemics, which meant that their effectiveness against such diseases was questionable.
When Astrid looked at her quickly fading patients, and into the young faces of her medical team, she knew that she needed a miracle, so did not discourage the Denobulan in his quest for a virus with its origin on earth. She did not halt her ceaseless search through the medical databases either. Two heads were better than one in such circumstances. On that, everyone involved could agree. Her instincts told her, however, that she was facing a terrible disease from an alien planet, possibly one that had been engineered for destructive purposes, as frightening as that seemed. How else could its devastating effect upon the human body be explained?
Another small concern tugged at the corners of the inimitable Doctor Zeller's mind as she researched and tended her patients. She could feel the effects of the disease beginning to slow her down, despite the best treatment options available. Her throat tingled, though she was not coughing yet, and the sickbay always felt too warm. Astrid knew that she would succumb before her medical staff by virtue of having the most contact with the afflicted. Who would resolve the matter if she could not? Phlox was certainly in no position to find a cure. The medical team, while more competent than previously believed, was not made up of qualified professionals, and they too were going to become quite ill if the disease could not be successfully treated soon. No one would be in very good position, it seemed, if she did not succeed before the illness rendered her useless.
The captain watched him from a seat well out of the doctor's way. The Denobulan physician looked tired, exhausted, and absolutely worn out. He had been working nonstop for several days. If Phlox had been human, he would have certainly have collapsed from fatigue. There was no doubt about it. Archer felt a surge of empathy as he watched the doctor rub his eyes and take deep breath. He was under so much pressure. It was incredible that he could bear it.
"Are you all right, doc? You look like you could use some rest. A couple of hours would probably do you a world of good." suggested Archer.
Phlox smiled softly and told him, "But I have this feeling. I feel as though I am so close to having the answer. A little more analysis, a little more reading."
"Have you eaten today, Phlox?" questioned the captain.
The doctor blinked and shook his head, telling Archer, "Believe me, captain, I will get something soon, when I find ..."
"The answers you're looking for. I understand ... I admire your dedication, but if you leave sickbay for an hour or so, you can come back with a fresh perspective. Sometimes that's more helpful than anything."
"You really think so, captain?"
"I'm almost positive." Archer answered, standing and gesturing toward the door. "And, if you don't mind, I think I will join you, doctor."
It was long after most of the crew had dined that evening when Phlox and Archer ventured into the quiet mess hall. Even as the doctor ate his meal, the captain almost imagined that he could hear gears turning as Phlox continued to ponder the problem of the mysterious disease. Archer understood how many lives were at state, including the lives of some of his best crewmen, but he also knew that everyone was doing their best and that the doctor did not bear the burden alone.
"Captain, if you were searching for information on viral infections of this nature, where would you look?" questioned doctor as he ate.
Archer was stumped by the inquiry for a moment. Medicine was hardly his area of expertise. But he knew why Phlox was asking him. He was human, for one thing, and he had an outsider, non-medical perspective for another.
"Well, actually I would go to you for this kind of thing." Archer admitted.
The captain thought he saw a glimmer of pride in the doctor's eyes, but Phlox shook his head and said, "Let's say that I'm not available."
"I guess I would check all the medical and biological databases. Then ... maybe the history books. Epidemics were a big deal at one time." mused Archer. "Before the Second World War disease was still running rampant over a significant portion of the globe." he added.
"You mean your historical texts would have accounts of various epidemics and outbreaks of disease?" questioned Phlox as though the idea had never occurred to him.
"Maybe not every epidemic ever, but some of the larger ones." nodded Captain Archer.
"That is most fortuitous. If you will excuse me, captain, I think I should find my way back to sickbay and begin pursuing this avenue of inquiry." said Phlox, beginning to stand.
"Go ahead, Phlox, but at least take the plate with you." sighed Archer, gesturing toward the half eaten meal.
Doctor Zeller was making her last rounds of the night, intended to put her mind at ease before attempting to get some much needed, if not well deserved, sleep. Her arrogant smirk had softened somewhat to an unhappy little sneer as Astrid walked the corridors between the sickbay where Cutler slept on a cot in the corner, ever at her disposal, and the two additional rooms containing the ill where her other helpers were sleeping by shifts with the lights dimmed. If she could have, if it had been either feasible or possible, she would have let them go, allowed them to convalesce in their own beds on the Enterprise, but it was neither of those things. Not only were they contagious, they were also still very much needed, though she seldom had the presence of mind or courage to tell them so.
At this point Astrid wasn't certain who she was checking on before seeking her own bed, a sturdy little cot in what was once the stellar cartography lab. Was it her official patients or was it the medical team? Many of the station personnel had almost been stabilized, but the Enterprise crew members were slowly worsening. Knight looked slightly jaundiced, even in the dim lighting. The two male crew members were demonstrating a severe loss of appetite. They would need supplements soon or fatigue would begin to set in like a gangrene of the will, responding to their incredible expenditure of energy without taking in calories to replenish themselves. But that wasn't what was killing them all. It was the unrelenting, unabating fever that was doing so. And by her estimation it would completely finish the job in no more than ten days.
When she entered the main shuttle bay, she was mildly surprised to see both crewmen stationed there wide awake and standing over a makeshift bed. They both turned when they heard her enter. Doctor Zeller saw it on their faces before they had the chance to speak. They had another patient that needed to be moved to sickbay for treatment that simply could not be provided in that non-clinical environment.
"There isn't any room." she said quietly, her voice having lost its edge.
"But ..." began Crewman Monroe, glancing back and forth between Zeller and their patient. "He's lapsed into unconsciousness. The fever ... Doctor?"
"The bio beds are all full and so are the two cots. Give him another ten cc's of Anaprovalin and turned him on his side if he begins to experience convulsions." she told him firmly, glancing at the young officer on the cot as well.
"Can't you do something, doctor?"
"I'm not a miracle worker, crewman. Just do as I ask, and one of you should get some sleep." she replied.
The look in their eyes said more than they would have dared to say aloud in her presence. The expression was one of hopelessness on the very verge of despair. Astrid had never, for all of her laboratory experience and knowledge from books, been in an actual plague hospital environment before. It left her unprepared. She did not know what to tell them, whether to lie or be truthful, whether to rally their spirits or give them the cold, hard facts. Zeller only knew that she was supposed to say something to two weak-kneed twenty-something's staring at her like she had all the answers.
Astrid looked at them and shook her head before turning and walking away. As the door closed behind her, one of the crewman simply stated, "That settles it. We are all going to die here."
Zeller did not hear the comment as she walked hurriedly to the lab that was substituting for quarters. She could only hear the thudding of her boots on the deck and her heart beating wildly in her chest. Astrid was abundantly aware that she should have told them something, but her thoughts were like grains of sand churning through a vast hour glass and then scattering upon the wind. Her confidence in her own intellect and ability was faltering. But if she did not have the answers, the ways and the means, who did? She was all alone and without a solution to the dilemma. Her laurels were turning to ashes around her.
"So much for peace of mind." thought Astrid Zeller as she entered the lab and sat down on the cot, too disturbed and beleaguered to fall asleep.
The sound of a quietly, yet persistently beeping communicator awaken Crewman Cutler during the earliest hours of the morning. At first she didn't want to untangle herself from her blanket to answer it, but she knew that it was Phlox and that he would worry if she failed to acknowledge. She stumbled from her bunk to the corridor before answering so as not to disturb the patients who were managing to slumber despite their high fevers and persistent coughing.
"Cutler here." she said hoarsely, keeping her voice low. Her throat sounded raw in her own ears. The medications were barely keeping the symptoms at bay.
"I am sorry to wake you, crewman." said Phlox apologetically.
"No, don't worry about. It isn't a problem." she told him.
"I think I have managed to identify the disease." he said with an almost audible smile. "I'm transferring all of the data I could come up with to the station's computer." Phlox added.
"Don't keep me in suspense!" she said, immediately feeling wide awake and much better as she began walking toward the nears communications station.
"Have you ever heard of something called Yellow Fever?" he inquired.
Cutler stopped in her tracks and asked, "It was a tropical plague or something hundreds and hundreds of years ago on earth, right?"
"Tropical, yes. Plague, certainly. But I am afraid that we are dealing with the here and now, crewman." replied Phlox.
"But this is good news. There is a cure for this fever, right? I mean, there has to be." said Cutler.
"Actually, there was a vaccine. I can not find a cure for Yellow Fever on record anywhere. I think most humans of the era when the disease was common either died because of it or had some sort of limited, genetic predisposition for immunity or resistance." Phlox explained to her.
"I don't think I like where this is going." she commented, taking a seat at a computer terminal.
"You shouldn't."
"Okay, Phlox, if the human body eventually learned to resist the disease ..." she began to say, formulating an intelligent question.
"Only those who lived in areas of constant exposure developed this trait, and I am ... sorry to say that the genetic advantage has probably diminished after so many generations with adequate medical care." he corrected.
"Right ... So how did they treat it back then?"
"They did exactly what Doctor Zeller is doing, although with less sophisticated medications."
Crewman Cutler groaned aloud and asked, "You mean just giving them something for the fever and discomfort?"
"And letting the virus runs its course." Phlox added.
"But we can't do that. We have people dying over here." said Cutler, her hands beginning shake.
"No, we aren't going to sit idly by and let ... many of the patients die." Phlox assured her, not wanting to quote grim statistics to the impressionable young crewman.
"Then what are we going to do?"
"We are going to succeed where nineteenth and twentieth century medical sciences failed. We will find a cure." said Phlox with immeasurable determination in his voice.
Doctor Zeller was tossing and turning uneasily in her sleep when a soft rapping upon the door startled her into wakefulness. She flexed her fingers nervously as she noticed a mild tingling sensation when she rose from her improvised bunk unhappily to answer the door. When she found Crewman Cutler standing outside her quarters with a data pad in hand, her heart sank.
"Which one?" she questioned, wanting to know which patient had died and holding out her hand for the pad.
"None of them." said Cutler quickly, still unsure as how to best handle the doctor.
"Then what the hell can you possibly want at this hour?" asked Zeller her personality showing through her illness and fatigue.
"It's Yellow Fever, doctor." said the crewman, pressing the pad into Zeller's hand.
All of the information was there from the files, reports, readings, and tests that Phlox had transmitted from the Enterprise to a probable history of transmission that Cutler had compiled herself using passenger manifests and other transit information. It traced the disease from the ship's doctor to earth where he had recently visited a friend at a clinic in the jungles of Africa, carrying the virus from a remote corner of their home planet to space.
"You must be joking, crewman. How would that particular disease wind up here? There are no mosquitoes on a space station for one thing." she answered.
"It's all on the data pad, doctor." she replied, cowed by the very formidable Doctor Zeller.
"I will look it over, but don't get your hopes up. This kind of thing is never solved by amateurs, you know."
"Of course not, doctor, but we need to examine every possibility." said Cutler, recognizing the dual insult flung at both Phlox and at herself.
"That's correct, crewman, but right now we both need to examine the possibility of getting a good night's sleep, for our patients' sake." said Astrid in condescending tones.
"Yes, doctor." said Cutler.
The report was thorough, and obviously a collaboration with her alien counterpart on the Enterprise. Astrid was startled, to say the least, by the rather convincing case present on the data pad. The evidence that the disease afflicting the inhabitants of the station and the medical team was Yellow Fever was surprisingly credible. At first Astrid had suspected that it was a harebrained hypothesis put together by an alien physician, desperate to prove that the disease wasn't also alien in origin, and his favorite naive crewman and protégé. But the more of the report she read, the more probable it seemed that they were right, that it was the ancient earth disease of Yellow Fever that her patients were suffering from.
Astrid sighed heavily and hung her head as she finished looking over the findings. Even if the problem had been identified, they were still a long way from finding a solution. If only she had realized what they were getting into in the beginning, then she could have easily come up with the vaccine and saved the medical team considerable grief. As it stood, she was uncertain of what her next move should be against so formidable an opponent. She was definitely going to verify the information she had received, but what then?
She had spent years and years filing head full of facts and figures regarding epidemics on earth. Doctor Zeller was firmly grounded in both the treatment and study of such things, but in all of her career, she had never imagined treating a tropical fever of earth origin in space. In all fairness it didn't look good and she knew it. As she left the sanctuary of the stellar cartography lab that morning, she was anticipating that fifty percent of her patients or more would not survive. Those were not good odds.
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A/N: Yeah, there's no way I'm a medical professional. Couldn't and wouldn't. So the research here came from online sources. I think it was time well spent, but some info may be wrong or matter of opinion or whatever else there may be. Most of my Yellow Fever stuff came from a British web site somewhere and the basic stuff from a conglomeration of first aid sites. Anyone out there know any decent medical web sites (in case I'm foolish enough to try this again)?
Two days later ...
Thirty-one patients had dwindled to twenty-six in approximately fifty hours, or a little more than two days according to the station's clock. The most critical patients had died from a combination of renal failure and the fever's effect on the brain. Other victims of the disease had taken their places in sickbay, which was being used as an intensive care area. The medical team, primarily due to their constant exposure, was beginning to exhibit early symptoms of contracting the virus, despite the fact that Doctor Zeller was keeping all of them pumped full of Anaprovalin and other substances to keep the illness at bay. It simply wasn't working. Nothing was working.
The long hours and difficult conditions were beginning to take their toll on the doctor. She occasionally reminded herself that falling victim of fatigue and thereby providing an already weakened host to the virus was not an acceptable course of action. The friendly lieutenant who had greeted her upon arrival had become one of her most critical patients in a few days' time because of those factors. Members of her own staff were dividing their time between tending patients and running the station with the help of automated systems and the Enterprise. Astrid was well aware of the hopeless look in the eyes of some of them. They didn't believe that they would be going home, going back to their star ship, alive.
But then there was her personal aid, Crewman Elizabeth Cutler, who was a pillar of strength to her crew mates, despite her own misgivings and fears. Zeller could see through the veneer of confidence, but not without acknowledging how brave the young woman was. Two days had been long enough to make Zeller realize that for all her gaping inadequacies, Cutler was one of the best crewmen to have around in a crisis. She had seen the ravages of disease before, on some distant and unimportant planet called Valakia, and she was not afraid. Zeller had a certain grudging respect for that. Of course, she knew that Cutler had a hand-held communications devise, which she used to keep in contact with Phlox, but that did not diminish her respect. Everyone needed an anchor, even if that anchor was an alien.
The chief medical officer of the Enterprise had become something of a nuisance to Zeller, although she did not doubt that the feeling was mutual. He had a strange theory that the illness was one native to earth and had somehow found its way into space. Granted, her research on widely known alien ailments had turned up nothing, but Phlox was truly going out on a limb to suggest the humans had carried a plague into space with them. The idea troubled Zeller profoundly, but most viruses native to earth could not stand up to the various medicines she had given her patients. She could not name a single common infectious disease that was not snuffed out with a simple treatment of Anaprovalin, much less tryptophan-lysine distillates. But she did acknowledge privately that they medicines were discovered long after the era of epidemics, which meant that their effectiveness against such diseases was questionable.
When Astrid looked at her quickly fading patients, and into the young faces of her medical team, she knew that she needed a miracle, so did not discourage the Denobulan in his quest for a virus with its origin on earth. She did not halt her ceaseless search through the medical databases either. Two heads were better than one in such circumstances. On that, everyone involved could agree. Her instincts told her, however, that she was facing a terrible disease from an alien planet, possibly one that had been engineered for destructive purposes, as frightening as that seemed. How else could its devastating effect upon the human body be explained?
Another small concern tugged at the corners of the inimitable Doctor Zeller's mind as she researched and tended her patients. She could feel the effects of the disease beginning to slow her down, despite the best treatment options available. Her throat tingled, though she was not coughing yet, and the sickbay always felt too warm. Astrid knew that she would succumb before her medical staff by virtue of having the most contact with the afflicted. Who would resolve the matter if she could not? Phlox was certainly in no position to find a cure. The medical team, while more competent than previously believed, was not made up of qualified professionals, and they too were going to become quite ill if the disease could not be successfully treated soon. No one would be in very good position, it seemed, if she did not succeed before the illness rendered her useless.
The captain watched him from a seat well out of the doctor's way. The Denobulan physician looked tired, exhausted, and absolutely worn out. He had been working nonstop for several days. If Phlox had been human, he would have certainly have collapsed from fatigue. There was no doubt about it. Archer felt a surge of empathy as he watched the doctor rub his eyes and take deep breath. He was under so much pressure. It was incredible that he could bear it.
"Are you all right, doc? You look like you could use some rest. A couple of hours would probably do you a world of good." suggested Archer.
Phlox smiled softly and told him, "But I have this feeling. I feel as though I am so close to having the answer. A little more analysis, a little more reading."
"Have you eaten today, Phlox?" questioned the captain.
The doctor blinked and shook his head, telling Archer, "Believe me, captain, I will get something soon, when I find ..."
"The answers you're looking for. I understand ... I admire your dedication, but if you leave sickbay for an hour or so, you can come back with a fresh perspective. Sometimes that's more helpful than anything."
"You really think so, captain?"
"I'm almost positive." Archer answered, standing and gesturing toward the door. "And, if you don't mind, I think I will join you, doctor."
It was long after most of the crew had dined that evening when Phlox and Archer ventured into the quiet mess hall. Even as the doctor ate his meal, the captain almost imagined that he could hear gears turning as Phlox continued to ponder the problem of the mysterious disease. Archer understood how many lives were at state, including the lives of some of his best crewmen, but he also knew that everyone was doing their best and that the doctor did not bear the burden alone.
"Captain, if you were searching for information on viral infections of this nature, where would you look?" questioned doctor as he ate.
Archer was stumped by the inquiry for a moment. Medicine was hardly his area of expertise. But he knew why Phlox was asking him. He was human, for one thing, and he had an outsider, non-medical perspective for another.
"Well, actually I would go to you for this kind of thing." Archer admitted.
The captain thought he saw a glimmer of pride in the doctor's eyes, but Phlox shook his head and said, "Let's say that I'm not available."
"I guess I would check all the medical and biological databases. Then ... maybe the history books. Epidemics were a big deal at one time." mused Archer. "Before the Second World War disease was still running rampant over a significant portion of the globe." he added.
"You mean your historical texts would have accounts of various epidemics and outbreaks of disease?" questioned Phlox as though the idea had never occurred to him.
"Maybe not every epidemic ever, but some of the larger ones." nodded Captain Archer.
"That is most fortuitous. If you will excuse me, captain, I think I should find my way back to sickbay and begin pursuing this avenue of inquiry." said Phlox, beginning to stand.
"Go ahead, Phlox, but at least take the plate with you." sighed Archer, gesturing toward the half eaten meal.
Doctor Zeller was making her last rounds of the night, intended to put her mind at ease before attempting to get some much needed, if not well deserved, sleep. Her arrogant smirk had softened somewhat to an unhappy little sneer as Astrid walked the corridors between the sickbay where Cutler slept on a cot in the corner, ever at her disposal, and the two additional rooms containing the ill where her other helpers were sleeping by shifts with the lights dimmed. If she could have, if it had been either feasible or possible, she would have let them go, allowed them to convalesce in their own beds on the Enterprise, but it was neither of those things. Not only were they contagious, they were also still very much needed, though she seldom had the presence of mind or courage to tell them so.
At this point Astrid wasn't certain who she was checking on before seeking her own bed, a sturdy little cot in what was once the stellar cartography lab. Was it her official patients or was it the medical team? Many of the station personnel had almost been stabilized, but the Enterprise crew members were slowly worsening. Knight looked slightly jaundiced, even in the dim lighting. The two male crew members were demonstrating a severe loss of appetite. They would need supplements soon or fatigue would begin to set in like a gangrene of the will, responding to their incredible expenditure of energy without taking in calories to replenish themselves. But that wasn't what was killing them all. It was the unrelenting, unabating fever that was doing so. And by her estimation it would completely finish the job in no more than ten days.
When she entered the main shuttle bay, she was mildly surprised to see both crewmen stationed there wide awake and standing over a makeshift bed. They both turned when they heard her enter. Doctor Zeller saw it on their faces before they had the chance to speak. They had another patient that needed to be moved to sickbay for treatment that simply could not be provided in that non-clinical environment.
"There isn't any room." she said quietly, her voice having lost its edge.
"But ..." began Crewman Monroe, glancing back and forth between Zeller and their patient. "He's lapsed into unconsciousness. The fever ... Doctor?"
"The bio beds are all full and so are the two cots. Give him another ten cc's of Anaprovalin and turned him on his side if he begins to experience convulsions." she told him firmly, glancing at the young officer on the cot as well.
"Can't you do something, doctor?"
"I'm not a miracle worker, crewman. Just do as I ask, and one of you should get some sleep." she replied.
The look in their eyes said more than they would have dared to say aloud in her presence. The expression was one of hopelessness on the very verge of despair. Astrid had never, for all of her laboratory experience and knowledge from books, been in an actual plague hospital environment before. It left her unprepared. She did not know what to tell them, whether to lie or be truthful, whether to rally their spirits or give them the cold, hard facts. Zeller only knew that she was supposed to say something to two weak-kneed twenty-something's staring at her like she had all the answers.
Astrid looked at them and shook her head before turning and walking away. As the door closed behind her, one of the crewman simply stated, "That settles it. We are all going to die here."
Zeller did not hear the comment as she walked hurriedly to the lab that was substituting for quarters. She could only hear the thudding of her boots on the deck and her heart beating wildly in her chest. Astrid was abundantly aware that she should have told them something, but her thoughts were like grains of sand churning through a vast hour glass and then scattering upon the wind. Her confidence in her own intellect and ability was faltering. But if she did not have the answers, the ways and the means, who did? She was all alone and without a solution to the dilemma. Her laurels were turning to ashes around her.
"So much for peace of mind." thought Astrid Zeller as she entered the lab and sat down on the cot, too disturbed and beleaguered to fall asleep.
The sound of a quietly, yet persistently beeping communicator awaken Crewman Cutler during the earliest hours of the morning. At first she didn't want to untangle herself from her blanket to answer it, but she knew that it was Phlox and that he would worry if she failed to acknowledge. She stumbled from her bunk to the corridor before answering so as not to disturb the patients who were managing to slumber despite their high fevers and persistent coughing.
"Cutler here." she said hoarsely, keeping her voice low. Her throat sounded raw in her own ears. The medications were barely keeping the symptoms at bay.
"I am sorry to wake you, crewman." said Phlox apologetically.
"No, don't worry about. It isn't a problem." she told him.
"I think I have managed to identify the disease." he said with an almost audible smile. "I'm transferring all of the data I could come up with to the station's computer." Phlox added.
"Don't keep me in suspense!" she said, immediately feeling wide awake and much better as she began walking toward the nears communications station.
"Have you ever heard of something called Yellow Fever?" he inquired.
Cutler stopped in her tracks and asked, "It was a tropical plague or something hundreds and hundreds of years ago on earth, right?"
"Tropical, yes. Plague, certainly. But I am afraid that we are dealing with the here and now, crewman." replied Phlox.
"But this is good news. There is a cure for this fever, right? I mean, there has to be." said Cutler.
"Actually, there was a vaccine. I can not find a cure for Yellow Fever on record anywhere. I think most humans of the era when the disease was common either died because of it or had some sort of limited, genetic predisposition for immunity or resistance." Phlox explained to her.
"I don't think I like where this is going." she commented, taking a seat at a computer terminal.
"You shouldn't."
"Okay, Phlox, if the human body eventually learned to resist the disease ..." she began to say, formulating an intelligent question.
"Only those who lived in areas of constant exposure developed this trait, and I am ... sorry to say that the genetic advantage has probably diminished after so many generations with adequate medical care." he corrected.
"Right ... So how did they treat it back then?"
"They did exactly what Doctor Zeller is doing, although with less sophisticated medications."
Crewman Cutler groaned aloud and asked, "You mean just giving them something for the fever and discomfort?"
"And letting the virus runs its course." Phlox added.
"But we can't do that. We have people dying over here." said Cutler, her hands beginning shake.
"No, we aren't going to sit idly by and let ... many of the patients die." Phlox assured her, not wanting to quote grim statistics to the impressionable young crewman.
"Then what are we going to do?"
"We are going to succeed where nineteenth and twentieth century medical sciences failed. We will find a cure." said Phlox with immeasurable determination in his voice.
Doctor Zeller was tossing and turning uneasily in her sleep when a soft rapping upon the door startled her into wakefulness. She flexed her fingers nervously as she noticed a mild tingling sensation when she rose from her improvised bunk unhappily to answer the door. When she found Crewman Cutler standing outside her quarters with a data pad in hand, her heart sank.
"Which one?" she questioned, wanting to know which patient had died and holding out her hand for the pad.
"None of them." said Cutler quickly, still unsure as how to best handle the doctor.
"Then what the hell can you possibly want at this hour?" asked Zeller her personality showing through her illness and fatigue.
"It's Yellow Fever, doctor." said the crewman, pressing the pad into Zeller's hand.
All of the information was there from the files, reports, readings, and tests that Phlox had transmitted from the Enterprise to a probable history of transmission that Cutler had compiled herself using passenger manifests and other transit information. It traced the disease from the ship's doctor to earth where he had recently visited a friend at a clinic in the jungles of Africa, carrying the virus from a remote corner of their home planet to space.
"You must be joking, crewman. How would that particular disease wind up here? There are no mosquitoes on a space station for one thing." she answered.
"It's all on the data pad, doctor." she replied, cowed by the very formidable Doctor Zeller.
"I will look it over, but don't get your hopes up. This kind of thing is never solved by amateurs, you know."
"Of course not, doctor, but we need to examine every possibility." said Cutler, recognizing the dual insult flung at both Phlox and at herself.
"That's correct, crewman, but right now we both need to examine the possibility of getting a good night's sleep, for our patients' sake." said Astrid in condescending tones.
"Yes, doctor." said Cutler.
The report was thorough, and obviously a collaboration with her alien counterpart on the Enterprise. Astrid was startled, to say the least, by the rather convincing case present on the data pad. The evidence that the disease afflicting the inhabitants of the station and the medical team was Yellow Fever was surprisingly credible. At first Astrid had suspected that it was a harebrained hypothesis put together by an alien physician, desperate to prove that the disease wasn't also alien in origin, and his favorite naive crewman and protégé. But the more of the report she read, the more probable it seemed that they were right, that it was the ancient earth disease of Yellow Fever that her patients were suffering from.
Astrid sighed heavily and hung her head as she finished looking over the findings. Even if the problem had been identified, they were still a long way from finding a solution. If only she had realized what they were getting into in the beginning, then she could have easily come up with the vaccine and saved the medical team considerable grief. As it stood, she was uncertain of what her next move should be against so formidable an opponent. She was definitely going to verify the information she had received, but what then?
She had spent years and years filing head full of facts and figures regarding epidemics on earth. Doctor Zeller was firmly grounded in both the treatment and study of such things, but in all of her career, she had never imagined treating a tropical fever of earth origin in space. In all fairness it didn't look good and she knew it. As she left the sanctuary of the stellar cartography lab that morning, she was anticipating that fifty percent of her patients or more would not survive. Those were not good odds.
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A/N: Yeah, there's no way I'm a medical professional. Couldn't and wouldn't. So the research here came from online sources. I think it was time well spent, but some info may be wrong or matter of opinion or whatever else there may be. Most of my Yellow Fever stuff came from a British web site somewhere and the basic stuff from a conglomeration of first aid sites. Anyone out there know any decent medical web sites (in case I'm foolish enough to try this again)?
