Koch’s early attempts to develop a vaccine failed, but his efforts did yield a valuable diagnostic tool: the tuberculin skin test. It’s a shot that scans for TB antibodies. If you’ve been exposed to the disease, the injection site on your forearm will flare up into a BRIGHT RED SKIN MOUNTAIN. The test is still part of routine checkups today among grade-schoolers, teachers, cops, and — as I would learn — Peace Corps volunteers.

There is a photo of me on Facebook from early 2010, lodged between a handful of party shots with fellow volunteers. We had traveled to Kiev from across Ukraine to make a weekend out of our mid-service medical checkups. I’m 23, hamming it up in melodramatic distress, and twisting my left elbow up over my head to show off the swollen red splotch on my forearm.

A positive skin test usually doesn’t mean you have TB — less than than 10% of people with positive skin tests ever develop an active case, because healthy immune systems can usually defeat the bacterial intruder. Several volunteers each year end up with the telltale red blotch; it was really nothing to worry about. We’d need a follow-up X-ray, but an active case was highly unlikely. So I cracked a few jokes and went back to pounding flat Chernigivske beers with my friends.

I had been in Ukraine since September 2008, after studying Russian in college. I volunteered at a school in an eastern mining town called Antratsyt. The town borrows its name from anthracite coal. The region is flat, but you can see hills in the distance — they’re “slag heaps,” or piles of debris extracted from mines. The town only runs water for a few hours a day to protect the mines from mudslides or collapse. But life wasn’t as bleak as it sounds. I had students who were so excited to practice their English that they would chat with me after school, perched in a row on the edge of a Soviet-era fountain long-since bone-dry. I struck up friendships with their parents and my fellow teachers. I toasted my colleagues over champagne and chocolate on Ukrainian holidays. One time, I even gave a thickly accented speech on international education at a school assembly that ended up on the TV news. I was happy.

My follow-up X-ray was two weeks later, in Kiev. Taking yet another 17-hour train trip felt like an epic hassle. Is there a word that means the opposite of hypochondriac? There should be, because that’s what I am. In hindsight, of course I had symptoms – I just wrote them off to other things. I had a bad cough, because I was a smoker at the time. I’d lost weight, because there was no American junk food to lose my will power around. I was run-down and sluggish, because it was the Ukrainian winter!

I got a ride with Dr. Sasha, one of the Peace Corps’ Ukrainian staffers, to my screening at a tuberculosis dispensary — tubdispensar — on the edge of the city. He spoke the sort of English that made me self-conscious about my Russian. He carried my Peace Corps medical history file on his lap. The most dramatic thing in it was an allergy to mangoes. (Not exactly a significant handicap in Ukraine.)

I was X-rayed in a machine that looked like an iron colossus. In the waiting room, I tried to distract myself with a biography of John Adams. (His son, John Quincy, spent years in the Russian Empire as Ambassador and managed to stay consumption-free.) Soviet-era medical facilities are much more dimly lit than their Walmart-bright American counterparts. To see the page, I had to squint.

The head TB doctor finally called me into the office. He explained the X-ray results and prognosis to Dr. Sasha, who relayed them in English to me. But when Dr. Sasha asked a follow-up question, they flipped back to Russian and cut me out of the triangle. My Russian was good – but not “unfamiliar medical jargon” good. But this wasn’t a conversation I could stand to be excluded from. I was on the brink of a tantrum.

“Goddamn it!” I wanted to shriek at the TB doc. “Don’t say it in his Russian. Say it in mine.”

My face must have looked like a cartoon teakettle. So he slowed down and turned toward the image pinned to the light board.

“Classic pulmonary TB,” he said to me. (Words like pulmonary and tuberculosis are cognates.) “It’s strange that it advanced so quickly. Especially for a healthy young girl.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I heard you guys muttering about bronchitis or pneumonia before. Could it be one of those?”

“No. We assumed it could have been at first, but this is a clear case. See, on an X-ray, healthy lungs should look solid black. See the contrast down by the lower ribs? But now look up on the right. See the [blahblahblah]? The [blahblahblah] is the tuberculosis.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t get that word. What part is the tuberculosis?”

He sighed. It would have been easier to let Dr. Sasha translate. Now he had to dumb down his lexicon for a rattled American.

“Up there. Upper right. Well, left on here. That white spot? The part that looks like a ghost.”

That night, I started treatment in a studio apartment the Peace Corps rented for me in Kiev. My prognosis was good. For two weeks, I took pills, got X-rayed, and hocked up sputum — a polite word for loogies — into sterile plastic cups for lab work. One set stayed in Ukraine; the other was shipped according to special biohazard protocol to an American facility to better coordinate my care at home.

Eight weeks later, just as life was settling down back in Chicago, I was surprised to find an ominous number of missed calls on my phone: from the diagnostic lab, my mom, my American pulmonologist, my mom, the Cook County Department of Public Health, my mom, my mom, the Cook County Department of Public Health Epidemiology Unit, my mom, my mom, my mom, my mom, my mom.

Those loogies had yielded bad news. I had XDR-TB. The bad kind.

Effective immediately, I was placed under an isolation order. I was told to stay home whenever possible — I could go outside sparingly, but any other indoor space was off-limits until I was noninfectious. A few months, at least. The police could get involved if I didn’t comply.

A month into my quarantine, my Chicago doctors were stumped. They’d rarely seen anything like this.

So I set off on a journey not unlike those taken by consumptives a century before. I left my bustling, industrial Midwestern city and headed west, to the National Jewish Health Center in Denver.

It was the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives back then. In 1899, the brand-new philanthropic institution was brimming with needy patients. In 2010, I was the only one.

I told almost no one where I was going. I had already been avoiding friends who tried to contact me. It is exhausting to have your life flipped around by something people know nothing about. You get so damn sick of telling the story. Weird caveats demand exposition. Here is what I have. Here is why it’s bad. Here is why I had to evacuate Ukraine and leave the Peace Corps early. Here is why I can’t be in public or see anyone for the foreseeable future. Here is why I am going to some hospital in Denver for a long time. Here is why they chopped off a big chunk of my lung. Here is why I have this IV armband thing for nine months. Here is why I puke a lot. Here is why food tastes all wrong. Here is why my hearing got warped. Here is why I can’t feel my toes. Here is why I am not supposed to drink any alcohol. Here is why I’m still going to anyway.

Since I was on the no-fly list, we drove the 15 hours by car. I wore a mask the whole time so I wouldn’t infect my parents.