Tally and Drew were watching her with concerned looks on their faces. “Can we help you?” Tally asked.
“Kevin,” she said, sitting down on the nearest lab stool. “Go get Kevin and tell him I want to see him right away.”
Drew left to go fetch Kevin while Tally stayed and discussed their findings with Sarah in a bit more detail. In another minute, Drew returned with Kevin trailing him, phone in hand.
Sarah smiled and said, “Kevin, you don’t by any chance know if Molly has a cat, do you?”
Kevin shook his head and began typing with both of his thumbs furiously into his phone. In a few seconds it pinged with an answer.
“She says yes, but that it would never hurt Opus.”
“Opus?” asked Drew.
“What’s going on? Did I miss something?” asked Tally, looking from Kevin to Sarah and then to Drew, who shrugged his shoulders at her.
“That’s what she calls her mouse,” said Sarah.
Drew’s brow furrowed. “I’m not sure I get what…”
Another ping interrupted Drew and Kevin said, “She says her cat loves him.”
Cat. Sarah pictured her pathology teacher, a tall, lean man with little round silver rimmed glasses. He was a stickler for details and he had made them memorize all of the common human pathogens and their hosts. All semester long they had been expected to be able to recite the details of every infection they had ever studied. He had drilled them mercilessly. She was only mildly surprised that now, after fifteen years, she still knew so much of the epidemiology by heart.
Toxoplasmosis gondii is carried in the intestinal tract of cats. The memory came back to her clearly now. Infected cats were only contagious for a few days of their lives. People could contract the disease from being anywhere near where a cat defecated, whether it was a litter box or an outdoor sand pit or garden. These areas remained contaminated for a up to a year afterwards. Cats contracted the disease from eating infected rodents.
“Outdoor cat?” she asked.
“Yes.”
And there was something about kittens commonly spreading the disease when they caught the infection from their parents. Each cat could catch the infection only once, but cats had multiple litters of kittens and they expanded the window of possible contamination.
“Any kittens lately, by any chance?” It felt really funny to Sarah to be having this conversation through a proxy, but Kevin was taking it all in stride, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. He poked furiously at his phone, and then he looked up at Sarah, obviously surprised, and nodded.
“Two months ago. Six of them.” The phone immediately chimed again. He paused for another moment and then handed the phone to Sarah.
On the small screen was a picture of two adorable, fuzzy little kittens rolling around on a piece of beige, carpeted floor, with a white mouse. Sarah smiled and handed the phone back to Kevin. Then she took a deep breath and turned to Tally. “Okay, so it looks like Toxoplasmosis you say?”
“Well, it certainly is acting like it,” said Tally, still obviously baffled by the interchanges. She had peeked at the phone screen as Sarah was handing it back, but of course, she didn’t have the context to understand the significance. “We’ve got a couple more tests still running, but we should know the answers soon, like right after lunch, I think.”
“Well, at least we know what they have, and how they got it,” said Sarah, feeling a measure of relief for the first time in days. “I’m not saying that it’s good. It’s disheartening that they are infected, but there’s nothing for it. I’m just glad we got to the bottom of this mystery.”
“Earth to Dr. S. Hello, we still don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” said Drew. Sarah quickly filled him and Tally in, noticing with a bit of satisfaction how Kevin blushed further as she told the story. She left out his part of the tale, but she knew he now felt worse since he understood the enormity of what had occurred with the contamination.
“We’ll need to have all of the infected mice destroyed. Kevin, will you see that that gets done right away?” Sarah asked.
Kevin nodded.
“Good. And I’ll have a meeting with Rhonda tomorrow afternoon when she gets back to give her the bad news. I was trying to put it into a report, but now I’m thinking it will be better to just sit down and tell her the sordid story with all the background. Is there a blood test for Toxoplasmosis so we can make sure we’re starting with clean mice when we begin the experiments again?”
“I’ve got one ordered,” said Drew. “They’re sending it overnight, so we can begin testing right away.”
As Sarah walked slowly back to her office, she realized that there was something about all of this that was still niggling at the back of her mind, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. The good thing about being injured, she thought again, was that it forced her to slow down and look at things more deliberately. With each step she took, she went over the events in her mind again.
They had created the mice model controls. The procedure had been done correctly. The mice were all related genetically. Some lived and some didn’t. They also knew that Molly had admitted to bringing her mouse to visit the other mice. And now some of the mice showed evidence of what might be a Toxoplasmosis infection. What was she missing?
She reached her office and sat down behind her desk. She glanced at her watch and realized it was after 1:00 pm, much later than her usual lunch time. As if on cue, her stomach grumbled. She reached for her thermos bag and fished out its contents.
As she sat munching on her apple, she once again pulled up Emile’s charts of the mice and began reviewing them. Her conversation with Kevin and Molly from yesterday kept circulating in her mind, now in the forefront, now further behind, but never entirely out of sight. It seemed plausible that Molly’s mouse—what had she called it? Opus? Strange name. It was likely that Opus had become infected with Toxoplasmosis when it had interacted with the kittens, and then it had shared the infection with the other mice when she brought him back to the vivarium. Mice were gregarious, Sarah thought, and Molly was probably right in that it had most likely missed its friends in the lab.
But to bring it back like that, without permission, and then get it mixed up and leave it overnight? What a tremendous blunder!
Well, there was nothing for it now. At least, she repeated to herself for the tenth time, at least they had gotten to the bottom of it. They would have to test all of the mice they had not yet used from that room in the vivarium. C12. That was the room where Molly worked. Were there enough mice from other rooms to begin the trials with the Laptev virus again soon? And meanwhile all of the mice that they had used, all of the ones still living, would need to be destroyed. They should begin with a clean slate.
Sarah scrolled through more tables and found a new one that had just been uploaded that morning by Tally. In this one the mice were tracked by their numbers, the ones on their ear tags. She was about to click to another screen when something made her stop. She looked at the table again. The mice were labeled, ‘C12-229, C8-456, C12-237, C12-241, C8-514’, and so on.
It was clear that the C12 and C8 prefixes came from the rooms in which the mice had been housed, while the second part of the label identified each particular mouse. Sarah stared at the numbers in the columns and once again something niggled in the back of her mind. There was something that she was missing.
“Look carefully, Sarah,” she said to herself in a low voice. What was it that she wasn’t seeing? What question should she be asking that she wasn’t asking? For research, she knew, wasn’t just about getting data, it was about seeing patterns and figuring things out from the data in front of you.