Part 1: The Breach

As he leaned forward to view the slide, sweat dripped down his nose and onto his lap. Good God I'm sweating like a pig! He wiped his face once again using his sleeve. He knew this would be a crap shoot -- a simple blood smear without any staining techniques was unable to reveal much. Even his own white blood cells would be difficult to visualize. He peered into the microscope.

40x magnification. He shifted the slide to bring his sample into view. He began to notice his hands develop a fine tremor that seemed to make this task more difficult than he remembered. The sample appeared mostly red with a few heterogeneous areas flowing back and forth -- blood and plasma. At such low magnification he knew this was unlikely to be of much help.

Completely normal.

100x magnification. Individual cells could barely be discriminated. They resembled red-dyed oats being poured out of a bag into a feeding trough.

Dr. Banks swallowed. Now let's take a real look.

400x magnification. He could finally peer into the whirlwind of flowing cells. The vast majority looked like small red inner-tubes. The color came from the state of hemoglobin -- red when bound to oxygen, blue when empty. He recalled seeing the deep purple cells in a sample collected from cadavers during his Pathology residency, long devoid of oxygen. But his appeared red and full of life -- and totally normal.

1000x was the highest he could go with this simple light microscope. Any further would require use of the Electron Microscope, which had multiple drawbacks. It was cumbersome, slow, and the sample had to be dead and held static to be viewed. It gave very little representation of three-dimensional structure and function, as only very thin slices could be viewed. Light Microscopy, though somewhat crude, allowed for fluid samples to be viewed in real-time.

With a sigh, he adjusted the lens.

1000x. At this level of magnification he could see in much better detail the red blood cells. They appeared stuck in slow motion as they slowly shifted in the sample. Most were without a nucleus, as they were in the mature state. These were stacked on each other like piles of tires at a landfill. A few rare cells were slightly largeri, representing immature red blood cells that had yet to begin their mission in life. An occasional white blood cell drifted into view, a complete outlier in the sea of red. These had various forms depending on their function, but appeared slightly larger than the surrounding red cells and each had a varying number of nuclei. All normal.

Maybe I'm missing something? Or maybe it's all in my head? He shook his head. But the fever. Fevers mean infection until proven otherwise. I just have to find what it is.

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