At the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Sandra Ford handles drug requests and receives a multiple order for pentamidine, “one of the dozen drugs that were used so rarely” (54) by the same New York physician to treat Pneumocystis. Although she finds it odd, she approves the request.

In Washington, DC, Tim Westmoreland, chief counsel to the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, could see that under the Reagan administration, the health budget “would be worse” (55).

In San Francisco, a baby boy with a genetic complication needs a blood transfusion. A seemingly healthy donor's blood is transfused. Meanwhile, on Castro Street, Kico Govantes and Bill Kraus are smitten with each other, but they disagree on the premise of bathhouses. For Kico, it is “dirty” and having nothing to do with love, while Bill reacts in a manner that is “overly sensitive and defensive about the commercialization of gay sex” (58). 

Jim Groundwater diagnoses Ken Horne with cryptococcosis, which alarms him, as Cryptococcus “was a parasite most commonly found in bird feces” (60). 

At the CDC offices in Atlanta, Sandra Ford “filled five orders for adult male patients with unexplained Pneumocystis” for pentamidine (61). When the same doctor keeps asking, she becomes puzzled, as the “drug works and the Pneumocystis goes away” (63).