AFTER SOME QUICK, back-of-the-envelope calculations, Duane Johnson estimated that the radioactive pellet from Novak’s gut was packing somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred curies of radioactivity, and it was spewing pure gamma, the most penetrating form of radiation. “Like armor-piercing X-rays,” Miranda said, and Johnson nodded grimly. The image was vivid, but it was far from reassuring.
Hank arrived just as Miranda, Garcia, Emert, and I were heading upstairs to the ER. He offered to help Johnson retrieve the source and get it shielded. Dr. Chris Sorensen, an emergency physician specializing in radiation accidents, was on his way from Oak Ridge as well, Hank said, and would meet us in the ER. Meanwhile, Dr. Sorensen was on the phone with Dr. Al Davies, a UT emergency physician Johnson had paged, briefed, and asked to meet us in the ER.
Never in the history of UT Hospital’s ER had four people been processed so swiftly. Dr. Davies whisked us back to a triage suite, where he assigned a nurse to each of us. In no time, all four of us had tourniquets around our biceps as nurses prepared to draw blood.
Three of us were stuck almost in unison, the blood spurting thick and dark into a series of five vials. Garcia’s arm remained untouched. Garcia was holding his right arm across his belly; his face was tense with pain. His nurse, a thickset and graying woman who appeared to be in her fifties, took a step back. Dr. Davies hurried to her side. “Nurse, is there a problem?”
“I…” she faltered. “I heard it’s something radioactive. Is that true?”
“We’re not certain, but we think so, yes,” said Davies. “That’s why we need the blood samples, so we can tell how severe the exposure is.”
“I’m not comfortable doing this,” she said. “I’m afraid. I don’t want to be contaminated.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” snapped the doctor. Then, seeing the near-panic in her eyes, his tone softened. “This isn’t something he can spread to you,” he said. “It’s not like a virus or a chemical. It’s more like a sunburn, even though it isn’t showing up yet. You can’t catch this from him, any more than you could catch a sunburn.” He laid a hand on Garcia’s shoulder and left it there, showing her there was nothing to fear. “I’d draw his blood myself, but it’s been twenty years since I’ve done it, and it’d be cruel and inhuman treatement if I stuck Dr. Garcia with my rusty skills.” Still she held back, motionless except for her head, which began shaking “no.”
Just as Davies was drawing himself up to his most authoritative physician posture, my nurse—a young woman who had filled my two blood vials with cool efficiency—stepped in, taking the syringe from the hand of the reluctant nurse. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got it.” She tapped her index finger on the inside of Garcia’s elbow to bring the vein up, then eased in the needle.
Garcia raised his head and studied her face. “What’s your name?” His voice sounded reedy and forced.
“Darcy,” she said. “Darcy Bonnett.”
“Thank you, Darcy.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. When she was finished, she gave Garcia’s hand a quick squeeze.
After drawing our blood, they sent us to bathrooms with plastic specimen cups. When I emerged, the cup warm in my hand, I saw a tall, tanned, silver-haired man in civilian clothes—khaki pants, a blue shirt, a red tie—conferring with Dr. Davies. He introduced himself as Chris Sorensen, a radiation-medicine physician from REAC/TS. As Miranda, Garcia, and Emert emerged from other bathrooms and handed off their pee, we all instinctively gathered around Davies and Sorensen. “I just got an update from Hank,” Sorensen said. “He and Duane Johnson think they can retrieve the source and get it into a shielded vessel. So the good news is, this should be contained quickly.”
“I can tell you’re about to drop a bad-news shoe,” I said.
“It’s not great,” he said. “It’s a gamma source, for sure; luckily, it appears to be a sealed, single-point source—that little pellet that came from Dr. Novak’s intestine. Gamma sources don’t spread contamination, they just emit radiation. Like light, from a lightbulb, rather than water from a garden hose.” This sounded like something from a high school science-class talk he’d given a lot of times. “But this source is iridium-192, which is very intense.”
“You mean dangerous,” said Miranda.
He hesitated, but only briefly. “Yes,” he said, “dangerous. Those of you who touched it”—he looked directly at Garcia and Miranda, so I knew Hank had briefed him—“will probably have burns on your hands. My other concern is how much whole-body dose all of you got. We need to know whether it’s enough to damage your bone marrow or the lining of your GI tract. We’ll need to do whole-blood counts again at twelve hours and twenty-four hours to see if your lymphocyte counts are dropping.”
“Excuse me, Doc,” said Emert. “Our what counts?”
“Lymphocytes,” he said. “They’re a type of white blood cells. If they drop significantly, it means the stem cells in your bone marrow have been hit hard. Also means you’re vulnerable to infection.”