Through the broad faceplate of her astronaut-like helmet, she saw worry on the face of Jean Litwack. Jean was one of two nurses on campus credentialed to work with the rigorous protocols of the BSL-4 lab, but she had never tended to a live patient under these conditions, nor ever seen a patient as sick as the one that lay before her now. “I’m going to draw a blood sample,” said Cricket over the intercom inside her helmet. She had just finished inserting a central venous catheter, a thin tube that ran from the jugular vein in Yolanda’s lower neck all the way to her heart. She could use it to administer medications quickly, or, as now, to draw out blood for testing. Unzipping a vent flap in the plastic isolation tent, she reached through the tangle of electrical cables and IV lines with double-gloved hands and screwed a Vacutainer tube holder onto the connector at the end of the central line. Then she pushed a red-topped collection tube into the holder. As the perforator inside the holder pierced the rubber diaphragm in the cap, the tube automatically sucked out 4 cc of blood.
