Part Two: Patient Zero

Entry 13. September 9 through October 8, 2026. The quiet weeks. A gap I can account for.

Twenty-nine days between the clean room and the cut, and this entry could honestly be one sentence long: I felt wonderful.

The record deserves the sentence unabridged, because it is the cruelest sentence in the book. Not: I felt nothing. Not: I noticed nothing. I felt wonderful, in the precise clinical sense that wonder is present in it. The head cold that swept my floor the third week of September (Bill DeSouza sneezing into his Terps lanyard, half my team on soup) skipped me, and I logged it as luck. My left knee, which had clicked on stairs since a residency basketball game in 2017, stopped clicking; I noticed on the Chesapeake stairwell, three flights up, when I arrived at the top and realized I had been listening for it the way you listen for a friend's cough in the next room, and it simply wasn't there. My reading glasses (drugstore ones, 1.25, kept in the car for menus) began to smear the menu instead of sharpening it. I ordered without them and made a joke to Terrance about second puberty, and he laughed, and I am confident, replaying it, that neither of us gave it two seconds' thought. Why would we? Decline announces itself. Repair works quietly, like a good janitor, and leaves you a cleaner room you assume was always that clean.