Us Against All Odds (En)

the result

If I thought I'd never see you again, I'd shed so many tears that we'd have to sit in a can't to have breakfast.

Nicholas Sparks

-----

- "I have both your results..." He said with an ever so serious look on his face.

Why did he have to be so serious? He knew how to joke. They knew it, but when he was in doctor mode, he became unflappable, like a military man.

-"We're listening," Carina said with a serious look, sitting down and taking his wife's hand.

-----

-"Maya, have you been in contact with someone who is sick?" Said the doctor, keeping a certain distance.

She was confused by his question.

- "uh yes Cam..."

-"No Maya, I'm not talking about that... Have you been in contact with birds for example?"

- "uh..."

- "Maya you have contracted H5N8"

- "what?!" she said in shock

Carina had immediately dropped her hand, out of pure reflex.

"I have the bird flu?!"

- "yes"

- "a farm in Sicily, we visited a farm in Sicily, before we left, but we didn't..." answered Carina, finally reacting.

-"Yes, I went to the chicken coop..."

-"Maya, we're going to put you in an isolated room, in quarantine. Even if there is no case of human-to-human transmission, Carina, you will have to be on antivirals and we will have to draw blood from the people you have been with."

- "but if it is not transmissible by humans..."

- "yes, but it's better to be careful."

- "Carina your results show nothing"

- "so she doesn't have HIV" was all Carina could manage to articulate, her eyes fixed on the sheet of the bed.

-"No, Maya does not have HIV."

She had turned around and cupped her wife's face to kiss her, her cheeks drowned in tears.

- "Carina!!!" Said Owen excitedly at her incomprehensible behavior. "What is it in quarantine that you do not understand?!"

- "sorry"

This had made her wife laugh somewhat.

Two minutes later a mask had been given to Carina by an Ashley who was also wearing one; she and Grace, who was also wearing a mask, had moved Maya to another room in quarantine. She had also had to put on a mask to get through the halls.

- "Carina," Owen said, still serious. "Even if it's not HIV, we're going to have to watch her closely. And so will you. She could get pneumonia. This morning I think that without your intervention and that of her team, she could have passed. We have to be careful, this is serious. She was over forty-two degrees when she came into the ER..."

-"Thank you, Owen," said the Italian woman, placing her hand on his arm.

- "Don't be careless and go get a treatment for yourself. And you're not going into that room!"

Seconds had seemed like minutes, minutes like hours, hours like days and days like weeks. Maya had been in quarantine for ten days.

Her firefighters had gone home to disinfect everything and Carina had managed to stay away from her wife during that time, watching her through the glass that separated the room from the hallway. She had not contracted anything and Maya had been the only victim.