Mysterious illness?

[Joschka]

I had an unusual dream last night that I remembered with unusual clarity when I woke up this morning.The main part of it began when I was pulling into the parking lot of a strip mall type area in Chicago with my friends. I live on the east coast, so I don't know why I would have been in Chicago. There was a doughnut shop with a police car in front of it and a drug store, etc. - the usual strip mall businesses. As we were getting out of the car we observed a large older car, something like a Caprice say, plow into a light pole near us. Since we all are allied health workers we ran over to help. There were I think two people [man and woman, middle aged, lower middle class looking] in the car and it was immediately obvious that there was something else wrong with them other than that had just crashed into a pole at low speed in a parking lot. Both of the occupants were slumped over unconscious and appeared very pale. For some reason, I immediately felt that they had some sort of infectious disease.The cop that went with the police car had come over in the meantime and I had him come back with me to the drug store where I had them give us some boxes of gloves and masks and whatever else they had on hand that might be useful for responding to the accident.I remember emphasizing to the people in the drug store that we were going to need as many masks as they could find, whatever kind they could scare up and lots of gloves to begin with.Then there was a sort of jump in the dream. For some reason no ambulance ever showed up, and we wound up making make-shift stretchers and bringing the two people into some kind of big wood working shop [it almost seemed like a shipwright operation, but I don't know if there would ever be such a thing in Chicago] that was in the area. I clearly remember the male patient being laid out on something like a large drafting table with what looked like an a-line set up on his left. I don't know who was supposed to have placed that, because it certainly wasn't me.The patient was stable but non-responsive. The only thing out of the ordinary that we could find was that he had a sort of a lump visible on his abdomen about 3 inches below the sternum midline that we could not identify.In dream fashion somehow I 'knew' now that we were all quarantined in this shop and that we were not even going to get any supplies from the outside for some period of time. Apparently the 'authorities' somewhere had decided that since we had some kind of medical background they were going to put us in touch with some doctors on the outside via computer and they would tell us what to do without ever having to come and endanger themselves. But of course all we had to work with was whatever we had taken from the drugstore and what we could find around the shop.At this time also one of my friends had developed a similar looking lump on his abdomen, but he appeared to be perfectly healthy. So it was very unclear whether the lump had anything to do with the condition of the people we had found in the car to begin with. At this point, with our limited resources we had not identified any reason why the patients should have been unconscious to begin with. Then the dream jumped to a hospital and a surgeon had removed a very discrete abdominal mass from a patient and he was arguing with the pathologist about how to assess it.The mass appeared to be sort of oval or tear drop shaped I think and covered with an opaque white membrane. The pathologist wanted to start cutting it up to have a look at it, but the surgeon for some reason felt that the shape of the mass would be significant and he felt that it was too soft and the shape would be lost once an incision was made through the membrane. I think he was trying to have it imagined in a CT machine or something like that, and other medical staff were not going for it.Then it jumped back to the shop and we were inventorying the tools in the shop in case we had to perform surgery. It felt a bit more tense at this point, which you might imagine would be the case if non-surgical people were going to try to perform surgery with woodworking tools while being directed by someone over a webcam.That was pretty much the end of the dream as far as I can recall.