Armando Alcaraz

And so it would already be maybe 9.30 at night.

It was late, you know, and he said, I'm going to go and I'd leave too.

And he'd go to the grocery store to go buy some stuff to eat.

And so he would be standing in line and people would start to just move away from him because he had sort of was, you know, that smell of death was just in his clothes and in his hair and everything.

They had that task force that was just sitting there waiting for the results so they could move forward.

So that was putting a lot of pressure on us, and that's why we were working late.

No, but what the heck's going on?

And so the instrument would start leaking on me, the solvents, and I'd be frustrated and just like, oh, pulling my hair out.

He goes, I think we're there.

It was solid.

Actually, what the cartridge did was it acted like a magnet where it would just collect the drug or things similar to the drug and sort of gripped onto it.

And then it allowed us to then wash off all of like the tobacco products and other biomaterials that were in the tissue.

But the drug stayed attached.

But yeah, that was amazing.

That was a magic cartridge.

We didn't see anything.

I mean, there was no signal.

Then the second set of samples for the second patient and there was nothing there.

And then, you know, the third one, nothing there.

And then I'm thinking, oh, God, what's going on?