The Magic Bullet (34 page)

She stopped humming. “What’s the word, Doctor? Good news?”

“Status quo.”

“Well, where I come from, no news
is
good news.”

Talk about a dream patient! If only they could manufacture them to these specifications!

Distractedly, he laid aside the blood results and slid the X ray from its envelope. “Mrs. Rhome, there’s something I’ve got to discuss with you.…”

“Shoot.” But he could detect a trace of concern through the breeziness.

“Do you know what creatinine is? Has anyone explained that to you?”

“Not exactly.”

He stuck the X ray onto the view box and snapped on the light.

“Well, it’s a measure of kidney function.” He turned and faced her. “It’s one of the things we’re able to track through the blood tests.”

“Is there some problem with mine? Because, frankly, I feel great.”

“Well, yes and no. I’m sorry to say that we’ve had to take one woman off the drug because her creatinine rose to dangerous levels. Yours is not quite that high yet.…”

He paused.
That was strange
. He was staring at her chest X ray. The lungs appeared clean.

“But you’re saying there’s a danger of that?”

“It’s something we have to watch.…” His voice trailed off as he examined the film more closely. “Excuse me, Mrs. Rhome, you did have a chest X ray taken this morning, right?”

“Of course. Just a little while ago.”

“And how long ago was the last one taken?”

She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know, two or three weeks ago.”

“Excuse me just a moment, will you?”

Taking the X ray from the view box, he held it sideways
and read the name:
RHOME
. Putting it back in place, he looked at it once again.

No way, someone must’ve mislabeled this thing!

“What is it, Doctor?,” she asked, with sudden trepidation. “Nothing too serious, I hope.”

“No, no … I’m just looking at something. Nothing to worry about.”

He stepped across the room and picked up her file. He located her previous X rays—four of them, in chronological order. Taking up the most recent one, he read the date—“You’re right, the last one was exactly two weeks ago today”—and stuck it on the screen, alongside the other.

No question about it.

The X rays were Rhome’s. Both lacked a breast shadow on the right side, where she’d had her mastectomy. But one showed nodules, clear as day. While on this new one …

Only now was Logan aware of his heart beginning to pound.

“Doctor, can you tell me what’s going on? I feel a little like I’m in the dark here.”

He turned to her with shining eyes, trying desperately to maintain a professional bearing.

“Mrs. Rhome, Marjorie, I think I’m seeing something interesting on your X rays. Potentially very interesting.”

“Good news?” Despite himself, enthusiasm was coming through, and this was not a woman who had trouble catching it.

“I think so. Maybe. What I would like to do, if it’s all right with you, is have another X ray taken, just to be on the safe side.”

“All right.”

“And also call in my colleague, Dr. Como.”

“Oh, of course! I like her.”

“Excuse me for just a moment, please.”

He picked up the phone and dialed the nurses’ station. “This is Dr. Logan in Examining Room C,” he said evenly. “I’m going to need another chest X ray on Mrs. Rhome. If you could get someone in here, stat.…”

Hanging up, he turned to the patient. “A nurse will be in here soon. If you’ll excuse me just a few minutes …”

As soon as he was out of the room, Logan dashed down the corridor. He grabbed the in-house phone in the doctors’ lounge.

“Logan?” asked Sabrina, concerned. “Why are you calling me here?” Before he had a chance to respond, she suggested an answer to her own question—the one she had been dreading all morning. “This is about your meeting with Larsen?”

In fact, the session with the head of the Department of Medicine—which only minutes before had been the central fact of his world—now seemed completely beside the point. “No, no. I’m at the Outpatient Clinic, can you get right over here?”

“What for?”

“Please, Sabrina, tell them anything. Just get over here.”

She was there in ten minutes. “What, Logan? What did Larsen say to you?”

“Look at this.”

He handed her the two X rays and watched as she held them up to the window. “These are of Mrs. Rhome.…”

“Yes. And so …?”

But now, as she looked from one to the other and back again, he saw her expression begin to change; her eyes suddenly alive as the significance of the evidence before her became clearer. “These are the correct X rays? You checked?”

“Absolutely. No question.”

“I must see them in a light box!”

“You won’t see anything different.” He paused, then, softly: “I tell you, Sabrina, it’s a miracle.”

She’d never have believed she would hear Dan Logan say such a thing; like herself, like all dedicated researchers everywhere, he’d always defined himself, above all, as a skeptic. There
were
no miracles in medicine.
Everything
had a plausible explanation.

But now she only nodded in mute agreement.

“The question is what to tell her. She’s still waiting in the examining room.”

“She doesn’t know?”

“I wanted to talk it over with you first.”

She sat down on the window ledge and again held the latest X ray to the light. “I think we must take another picture, no? To be sure.”

“I did already. Sabrina, this
is
the second X ray.”

She nodded soberly. “Still, we must not give false hope.”

“No. Of course not.”

Such conservatism came with the territory. The fact is drilled into those who fight cancer from day one: Perspective is everything. While the lows may be as low as they seem, the highs are never as high. For, in the final analysis, there
are
no definitive cures for cancer, just more or less effective ways of keeping the killer cells at bay for greater or lesser periods of time. Even if the story suggested by Marjorie Rhome’s X ray held up—indeed, if on further investigation ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of her tumor mass had disappeared—that meant there still lurked within her millions of malignant cells; any one of which could set in motion the process that would lead to her death.

Still, even as they conscientiously went for dispassion, neither could long deny what they were feeling. Complete and utter elation.

“So,” pressed Sabrina, “what should we tell her?”

Logan erupted in a smile. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Words don’t do the job.”

Ultimately, they elected to let the patient make the discovery for herself. When they returned to the room, Sabrina again put the X rays side by side on the light box.

“Would you like to see what Dr. Logan was seeing?” she offered.

Rhome shrugged and walked over. “I don’t think it’ll mean heads or tails to me.”

But as Sabrina indicated the nodules in the first picture, then indicated the same area in the second, entirely clear of tumor, Rhome turned to her with a sense of wonder that was almost childlike. “Does that mean what I think it does?”

“It’s a very hopeful sign,” agreed Logan. “
Extremely
hopeful.”

“This drug? It’s … working?”

Neither Logan or Sabrina had yet dared to say it aloud, but suddenly here it was. “We have real reason to be encouraged,” said Logan.

All at once there were tears in Marjorie Rhome’s eyes. “Oh, God! Oh, dear God!” And opening her arms wide, she drew Sabrina into a long embrace.

“Hey,” said Logan, laughing, “I had something to do with this too.”

Wiping away the tears with the sleeve of her gown, Rhome pulled away long enough to invite him into their embrace.

“I have to call home,” she said. “I have to tell my family.”

“Of course. Let me get you an outside line. Then we’ll give you some privacy.”

As soon as Logan and Sabrina were alone again, back in the doctors’ lounge, he smiled sheepishly. “It got a little sentimental in there, didn’t it?”

Sabrina turned to gaze out the window. A moment later, when she turned back, he was not surprised to see that her eyes were moist also. “Oh, Logan,” she said, throwing her arms wide, “I can hardly believe this.”

He took her in his arms and held her tight. Suddenly, now, she began crying in earnest; and, within moments, her body was racked by sobs.

“Shhh,” he comforted her, squeezing her even tighter.
He managed a small laugh. “What’s going on here? This is
good
news, Sabrina.”

But as she continued on, he fell silent, his face buried in her hair.

He didn’t want her to see that he was crying too.

G
regory Stillman was waiting when the First Lady’s car—a late-model Chevy Caprice—pulled up to the ACF’s Radiation Therapy Center.

“Right on time,” he said, helping her from the car.

“With all you’re doing for me,” she replied, “it’s the very least I can do.”

“Wait around the corner,” he instructed the driver, and ushered her into the nondescript brick building.

As in all such facilities, the floors aboveground were superfluous. For safety’s sake, the radiation equipment is housed deep underground. They proceeded directly to the elevator that would carry them five stories down.

Mrs. Rivers was operating under no illusions. At their first, extended meeting, Dr. Stillman had explained that, in cases like hers, radiation is almost always the treatment of choice; the conservative one that, for all horror stories told about it, actually carries relatively few side effects. She’d likely experience some diarrhea, he noted, “because there’ll be some scatter into the GI tract,” and perhaps fatigue. But even during the ten-day period she’d be receiving her daily dosage of three hundred rads, she’d be able to carry on almost as normal.

And if such treatment proved unsuccessful in eradicating the cancer? she’d asked.

Stillman had frowned, as if this was a bit of unpleasantness there was no need at this juncture to even consider. Well, he’d replied, there are a whole range of chemotherapeutic options to be considered—plus some exciting experimental options working their way through the pipeline.

“So,” he asked her now, as they slowly descended in the elevator, “how are your children?”

“Well, thank you. Of course, they don’t know about this.”

“No, I would guess not.”

“I’ve talked it over with John. We agree there’s no point telling them now.”

“No.”

She glanced at him, his eyes on the ceiling. She’d always been perceptive about people—far more so, really, than her husband—but it hardly required insight to see that this guy couldn’t have cared less about her kids.

“Do you have children, Doctor?”

“Umm. Actually, I do, yes.”

“Boys? Girls?”

“Two boys.”

“Ages?”

He actually hesitated. “Fourteen and twelve, I think. They live with their mother.”

He
thinks
? After their first meeting, she’d been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his manner was a matter of shyness or discomfort due to her position; heaven knows, she’d made that mistake often enough in recent years. But, no, it was the real thing. Gregory Stillman might be as gifted a cancer specialist as advertised, but he was hardly someone she’d ever choose as a friend.

They emerged from the elevator into a large, well-lit reception area. Today it was deserted.

“Where’s the receptionist?” she asked.

“Almost everyone in this facility has been given the next ten days off. They’ve been told we’re doing repairs on the equipment.”

“I hope no one is being denied treatment on my account.”

“I don’t think so. I would suppose they’ve been diverted to other facilities.”

Abruptly, a door at the far end of the room swung open
and a short, dark man in a lab coat walked toward them, smiling broadly, hand extended. “Forgive me, please,” he said, in an accent she took to be Greek, “I was not expecting you quite so soon.”

“Mrs. Rivers,” said Stillman, “this is Dr. Andriadis, our director of radiation therapy.”

He took her hand, still smiling. “I am a great admirer of both yourself and your husband.”

“Thank you.”

“Dr. Stillman has explained the procedure here? Everything is clear?”

“Yes, he has.” It wasn’t complicated, after all. The idea was to kill cancer cells by zapping them with a radiation beam. The specifics—that the radioactivity source was cobalt-60, producing a beam composed of energized photons—didn’t really interest her. She only knew that it destroyed everything in its path, healthy tissue as well as diseased.

“Now, the first thing we shall have to do,” he was saying, “is to draw some red-purple lines on your skin. I’m afraid these will be indelible for about two weeks. But they are necessary, so that each day we aim the beam in precisely the same place.”

She was reassured by his own obvious assurance. “I understand. I’ll just live with it.”

“I tell patients it is not so bad, as long as they stay away from the beach.” He smiled again. “But maybe with this heat, that’s not so easy.”

He led them from the reception area into a spacious room bearing four imposing machines, each set apart from the others by a concrete partition. Waiting here to assist in the procedure were two nurses, one male and one female. “This is where we will do our work,” said Andriadis. “But first I will ask you to put on a gown. The changing room is right over here.”

Only once she was in the room, the door shut behind her, was she aware of the full extent of her terror. She was about to put her life in these people’s hands! To allow her
body to be attacked by a device out of a 1950s Japanese scifi film! She couldn’t pretend to be brave any longer. Why, oh why, hadn’t she insisted that John come with her?

But, no, of course not. That was impossible.

“I’m ready,” she said a moment later, emerging from the room.

Dr. Andriadis seemed to sense what she was going through. “No need to worry,” he said, “you will do just fine. We are here to help.”