Janet liked it when the infirmary was silent. Silence meant that there was no emergency; no triage mayhem, no whining colonels, no flat-lining she could not explain. Daniel was breathing on his own now and he had been disconnected from most of the monitors. He was asleep naturally, the combination of his long wakefulness and recent trauma had wiped him out. Janet had finally chased Jack, Sam and Teal'c out of the infirmary two hours ago, insisting that she would sedate them herself if they didn't leave and get some sleep.
Now a small part of her regretted it. If Sam were here, Janet would have someone to talk to about the file she currently held in front her. It was the results of Daniel's latest blood test, one taken after this latest episode. And it was clear. The foreign proteins that Janet hadn't yet had time to identify were gone and Daniel's blood chemistry had been altered again.
This was more frustrating that Janet was prepared to cope with. She hadn't even properly diagnosed Daniel yet, and he had managed to stumble on to something that cured him, though, she admitted with a shiver, it had almost killed him in the process. Sighing loudly into the silence that pervaded the infirmary, Janet set the files aside and reached again for the papers she had used to record her sunscreen experiments on. She'd done long perplexing shifts on-call before. She could do it again tonight.
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Jack and Teal'c showed up in the infirmary bright and early the next morning, just as Daniel was finishing his second cup of coffee. Janet was pouring over the list of ingredients from yesterday's lunch which she had procured from the quartermaster, methodically ruling them out as she compared them to a list entitled 'Allergies: Jackson, Daniel (Earth Edition)'. She overheard Jack's greeting and Teal'c's polite inquiry after Daniel's health, and made her way over to the three of them.
"Sleep well, Colonel?" she asked, getting only the expected smirk in return. She turned to Daniel. "Daniel, do you remember exactly what you ate yesterday?"
"Well, to be honest, I wasn't really paying attention." Daniel replied. Jack swallowed a guffaw. "I was playing with the spaghetti, but I don't remember eating any of it. I only took one bite of my bread, and then–"
"What was on the bread?" Janet cut in.
Daniel shrugged. "It smelled a bit like garlic."
"Oh you have got to be kidding me!" Jack burst out. All heads turned to face him. "Can't go out in the daylight, drinks blood, a bit crazy and now can't stand garlic? What's next? Stakes and crucifixes?"
There was dead silence, yet again, as Janet assimilated the idea into a concept she could deal with under a scientific premise.
"That might explain why the allergic reaction escalated into anaphylactic shock," she mused.
"I'm allergic to a lot of things," Daniel protested, "But garlic isn't one of them."
"I can't explain it, Daniel, but you were definitely in shock. You even flat lined. Twice. And I have no idea why."
"I might," said Sam, appearing in the doorway. "I ran some tests on Daniel's blood and was able to isolate some of the chemicals"
"You were supposed to be sleeping."
"I got about four hours. Or so," Sam admitted with a smile. "Anyway, one of them was sulfenic acid."
As she spoke, Sam set a beaker, an eye dropper and two small bottles down on Daniel's bed side table. She poured the contents of one bottle into the beaker, and Daniel realized in a strangely detached manner that he was about to watch an experiment being performed on his own disembodied blood.
"Now, the sulfenic acid reminded me of something, so I checked the commissary menu."
"And did that tell you that our Danny boy has become a vampire?" Jack did not so much as flinch in the face of the looks Daniel and Janet were shooting him.
"Not exactly, sir," Sam said, and continued. "You see, garlic is an organic compound, obviously, but it's made up of some highly reactive stuff, specifically, a chemical called allicin."
"Which is what makes it a cleanser?" Daniel put forth.
"Exactly." Sam inserted the eye dropper into the second bottle and squeezed it full. "Now, in regular human blood, there is nothing for the allicin to react with, and it breaks down naturally. Daniel, on the other hand, had sulfenic acid, among other things and...."
Sam squeezed one drop of allicin into the beaker. There was a rather spectacular explosion and quite a bit of cursing as they all dodged broken glass.
"Sorry." Sam said.
"I believe I now understand the cause of Daniel Jackson's anaphylactic shock."
"Indeed," Janet breathed.
"Wait a minute," Daniel said. "That reaction was instantaneous. Why didn't I just explode in the commissary?"
"I wondered the same thing," Sam admitted.
"Penicillin." Janet said, more to herself and the file she'd left sitting on her desk than to anyone else. "You were given a routine dosage. It must have just taken out what it thought was another infection."
"Can you make this into a cure, Doctor Fraiser?" Teal'c asked.
"I think so," Janet said, a bit hesitantly. "I mean, we know it works, but Daniel is only alive now because he was literally right on top of a state-of-the-art medical facility when it happened."
Janet had moved across the infirmary while she spoke and ducked into her office for the file with Daniel's altered blood chemistry.
"I'd say that the garlic is the cure, but the sulfenic acid reaction is lethal unless tempered by penicillin," she continued. "I'll run some tests on the other infected samples and I should be able to come up with a cure."
"What about a vaccine?" Daniel asked. "This is one of those things what should be nipped in the bud."
Janet glanced down at the file again. "The cure and the vaccine should be almost the same. Your blood has been changed so that it now matches Esser's. You're immune."
"So there are three types of Sandiem blood then," Sam said. "Those who are Sanoctem, those who aren't Sanoctem yet, and those who never will be."
"Right."
"So, no sunscreen then," Jack said, sounding vaguely disappointed.
"No, I'll do that too," Janet said. "These people share our genome, and an allergy to penicillin is not uncommon."
"What do we do if a Sanoctem is–" Daniel began.
"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it," Jack cut him off. "How long, doctor?"
"If everything goes perfectly, I should be able to finish today," Janet said after a moment's thought. "We can work through the night if we have to."
"Make sure you and your people are rested enough for a field trip," Jack said. "If this works, you're taking your show on the road."
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to be continued...
