Terminal

“It’s an antibiotic,” she said. She gave Louis’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “Now you close your eyes and rest.”

Louis flopped back onto his bed. He chuckled. He liked people with a sense of humor. In his mind he repeated what the nurse had said: a wonder drug. Well, antibiotics were wonder drugs, there was no doubt. He recalled that Dr. Handlin had told him he might be put on antibiotics as a precaution after his operation. Louis vaguely wondered what it had been like to be in a hospital before antibiotics had been discovered. He felt thankful that he was living when he was.

Closing his eyes, Louis followed the nurse’s suggestion and let his body relax. The pain was still present, but because of the narcotic, it didn’t bother him. Narcotics were wonder drugs as well, and so were the anesthetic agents. Louis was the first to admit he was a coward when it came to pain. He could never have tolerated surgery back when none of the “wonder drugs” were available.

As Louis drifted off to sleep, he wondered what kind of drugs the future would bring. He decided he’d have to ask Dr. Handlin’s opinion. January 4, 2:53 P.M.

Norma Kaylor watched the drops fall into the millipore chamber hanging below her IV bottle. The IV ran through a large-bore catheter into her left arm. She had such mixed feelings about the medicine she was getting. She hoped the powerful chemotherapeutic agents would cure her breast cancer which, she’d been told, had spread into her liver and lungs. At the same time she knew the medicines were cellular poisons, capable of wreaking havoc on her body as well as on her tumor. Dr. Clarence had warned her about so many dreadful side effects that she’d made a conscious effort to screen out his voice. She’d heard enough. She’d signed the consent form with a feeling of numbed detachment.

Turning, Norma looked out the window at the intensely blue Miami sky, filled with massive bubbles of white cumulus clouds. Since her cancer had been diagnosed, she tried hard not to ask why me? When she’d first felt the lump she had hoped it would go away of its own accord, like so many lumps had done in the past. It wasn’t until several months had passed, and the skin over the lump had suddenly dimpled, that she’d forced herself to see a doctor, only to learn that her fears had been justified: the lump was malignant. So just before her thirty-third birthday she’d undergone a radical mastectomy. She hadn’t fully recovered from the surgery before the doctors began the chemotherapy.

Determined to end her self-pity, she was reaching for a novel when the door to her private room opened. She didn’t even look up. Staff at the Forbes Cancer Center was constantly in and out adjusting her IV, injecting her medicine. She had gotten so used to the constant comings and goings, they barely interrupted her reading anymore.

It was only after the door had closed again that she became aware she had been given some new drug. The effect was unique, causing the strength suddenly to drain from her body. Even the book she was holding fell from her hands. But what was more frightening was the effect on her breathing; it was as if she were being smothered. In agony she tried to get air, but she had progressive difficulty, and soon she was totally paralyzed except for her eyes. The image of her door being quietly opened was the last thing she knew.

1

February 26

Friday, 9:15 A.M.

“Oh, God, here she comes!” Sean Murphy said. Frantically he grabbed the charts stacked in front of him and ducked into the room behind the nurses’ station on the seventh floor of the Weber Building of the Boston Memorial Hospital.

Confused at this sudden interruption, Peter Colbert, a fellow third-year Harvard medical student, surveyed the scene. Nothing was out of the ordinary. It appeared like any busy internal medicine hospital ward. The nurses’ station was a beehive of activity with the floor clerk and four RN’s busy at work. There were also several orderlies pushing patients on gurneys. Organ music from the soundtrack of a daytime soap could be heard drifting out of the floor lounge. The only person approaching the nurses’ station who didn’t belong was an attractive female nurse who Peter felt was an eight or nine out of a possible ten. Her name was Janet Reardon. Peter knew about her. She was the daughter of one of the old Boston Brahmin families, aloof and untouchable.

Peter pushed back from the counter where he had been sitting next to the chart rack and shoved open the door to the back room. It was an all-purpose office with desk-high countertops, a computer terminal, and a small refrigerator. The nurses held their reports in there at the end of each shift, and those who brown-bagged it used it as a lunchroom. In the back was a lavatory.

“What the hell’s going on?” Peter demanded. He was curious to say the least. Sean was against the wall with his charts pressed to his chest.

“Shut the door!” Sean commanded.