[Gina Mazzio RN 01.0 - 03.0] Bone Set

by JJ Lamb

  Advanced medical care for arthritis? I guess they planned on replacing every joint in her body.

  “Have you gone out to Nevada to see your mom?”

  “Everything is so expensive and I just lost my job. I hope to visit her …soon.”

  “What exactly is troubling you? I mean, the fact she’s not close and you can’t see her doesn’t mean there’s something wrong.”

  “That’s true. But I’ve written to my Mom every day since she left. She hasn’t answered one letter.” Tears rolled down Tuva’s cheeks again. “That’s just not like her. I’ve even tried calling her, but they tell me she’s never available.” Tuva reached for a tissue from her purse. “Something’s wrong. She’s in some kind of trouble. I just know it.”

  Carl tapped his pencil on the desk top. “Tuva, let me do some digging around and see what I can come up with.”

  She studied him very closely. “You’re not going to bury this in some slush pile, are you?”

  Carl Kreuger shook his head, stood, walked around the desk and escorted her to the door and down the narrow hallway. “As I said, let me give it some thought. I’ll get back to you. I promise.”

  She gave him a forlorn look before opening the outer door to the OCI offices and heading for the elevator.

  Carl returned to his desk and stared at the computer screen. For a while he was caught up in the stats for the random, double blind study Zelint Pharmaceutical was involved in.

  He thought about Tuva Goldmich’s observations about her mother. But still, AZ-1166 could be an exciting drug.

  Yeah, how many of those have I seen go down the tubes in the last year? So many failures. So many duds.

  In a few minutes his mind was wandering and he was caught up in planning the next steps he would have to take to transfer the hell out of friggin’ New York City.

  Chapter 14

  Gina tossed and turned, stared into the dark night, while Harry slept like he didn’t have a care in the world. She couldn’t settle down. No matter how hard she tried not to think of her ex-husband, her mind drifted back to him and how he had almost killed her in a drunken rage. He’d beaten her, jammed a bottle up inside, tearing her insides until she’d almost bled out … died.

  She looked at Harry’s shadowy outline—peaceful, calm, sleeping on his side of the bed. When she lived with Dominick, he would spread out, shove her to the side until she could barely find a spot to hang on. Every time she would talk about getting a king-sized bed, he would laugh at her. That’s all. Just laugh.

  Gina forced herself to inhale through her nose and exhale through her mouth. Concentrate only on her breathing. She finally drifted into a light sleep. When the alarm went off, Harry kept trying to wake her, get her going. It wasn’t easy.

  “Bad night?” he asked.

  Gina nodded.

  “Dominick?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You know I won’t let him hurt you,” Harry said. “I promised before, and that promise is forever.”

  “But he’s out of prison now. The thought of him being free—“ It took her a moment to finish the sentence, she couldn’t stop the shivers that raced down her spine, “—it’s scary; he swore he’d kill me.”

  “He’s not getting anywhere near you, doll.” Harry reached out, pulled her into his arms. “He’s in New York, three thousand miles away. And we’re here.”

  “I hope that’s where he stays.”

  Harry held her at arms length. “Aren’t you the one who’s always saying: Take it one day at a time? I promise we’ll get through this.”

  She could barely smile.

  * * *

  Gina was caffeine-wired, sleep-deprived, and jumpy all morning. She kept her eyes on Rocky, but the creep seemed to do a great job getting patients ready for breakfast while she worked at top speed to get the pain meds out. He acted as if she didn’t exist and she returned the favor.

  When she had one med left to administer—not a narcotic for a change—she began to relax. She walked into Derek Kopek’s room and immediately detected a hint of nicotine polluting the air. But there wasn’t a sign of tobacco anywhere—no ashtray, no cigarette pack.

  Nothing.

  Kopek was standing at the window, his breathing labored; he was fighting for every breath just to remain upright.

  “Okay, Mr. Kopek. Where did you hide those cigarettes?” She wanted to call them coffin nails, but she thought it might be a rough way to begin a relationship.

  He completed a slow arc and looked at her. “You mean where are the coffin nails, don’t you? That’s what you really wanted to say. Right?”

  “Maybe. But I don’t have to tell you how uncool it is for someone with a ticker problem to smoke.” Her eyes swept over the swollen ankles sticking out of his carefully pressed pant legs.

  “Uncool? Stupid is probably what you want to say.”

  “Mr. Kopek—”

  “—oh, for heaven’ sake, call me Derek, will you” There were long pauses between every sentence to give him time to catch his breath. “And I’ll call you by your first name. That’s the way the world is today. We’re all ‘friends.’”

  “You seem to think you know exactly what’s on my mind, Derek.” She lifted a small paper cup off the identifying med card on her tray and handed it to him. Then she walked over to a dresser where there was a pitcher of water and an empty glass. The room was spacious, and it looked professionally decorated, with matching rust-colored curtains and bedspread. Pictures decorated the walls, along with a large framed map of South America.

  She filled the glass and brought it back to him. “So why don’t you take your pills and I’ll leave you alone. Since there’s no real need to verbally communicate. You already seem to know what I’m thinking or what I’m going to say.” She gave him a big smile and waited for him to swallow his meds.

  A pink flush spread across his face as he tossed the wadded medicine cup into a waste basket next to him. That minimal effort increased his breathing rate dramatically.

  “I suppose I am acting like an idiot.” He looked into Gina’s eyes for the first time since she stepped into the room.

  “Well, I might have chosen different words.” She laughed. “But it would have been something like that.” She pointed: “Nice map.”

  “I spent most of my life there in the jungles, mostly the Amazon, searching for plants that could contain healing compounds.” He moved slowly, collapsing into a chair.

  “And where are you from?”

  “You have to ask? That’s a first.”

  He smiled. “Okay, so how long has it been since you left New York?”

  “About three years.” She walked up to the window, sat on the sill. “Other than the Amazon, where are you from, Derek?”

  “Not too far from here. I was brought up in Reno.” His eyes drifted as though he was seeing something other than his room in the Comstock Medical Facility. “But I'm a stranger here. As I said, I’ve spent most of my life wandering through the Amazon rainforest.”

  A sudden coughing spasm shook his body. His breathing became even more rapid, shallower. He bent over, caught between coughing and trying to breathe. A small oxygen tank was close to him, but Gina could see he had no intention of using it. It was hard for her to sit there and not rush to place the oxygen jets into his nose.

  “How about using some oxygen to help you breathe?” she finally said.

  He shook his head.

  “Give the meds a chance to kick in. It’ll help soon,” Gina said. She took his hand and squeezed it.

  He finally sat up taller, but he rubbed hard at his chest. “Don’t bullshit … a bullshitter … Gina. This is never … getting better.” He ended the sentence with another bout of coughs that didn’t seem to want to stop.

  She thought about his chart, his diagnosis, his prognosis, and most of all, her observations. She could see what Derek Kopek had to cope with every single day and night. He was in the final stages of congestive heart failure.

/>   He’s right. He’s never getting better.

  She reached for a blood pressure cuff on the side table next to his bed and wrapped it around his thin arm.

  “Rocky took my BP earlier,” he said.

  She lifted the stethoscope from around her neck. “I know. But now it’s my turn.” She pumped and pumped the cuff for a reading.

  “It’s high isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe it would help to ditch the cigarettes, Derek.”

  “Maybe it would, but it’s not going to happen.” He looked back toward the window again. “There’s not much that I live for now. A couple of those coffin nails a day is not going to matter much one way or another.”

  * * *

  Derek watched the tall, attractive nurse leave his room. There was vibrancy and strength in her body movements, a “full-of-life” drive that he couldn’t help but admire. He’d always been drawn to people like her. He’d thought of himself as strong and energetic until his mind started slipping away.

  No other way to describe it. Slipping away.

  The loss of memory happened bit by bit, until he couldn’t classify even the simplest organic molecular structure, or remember his closest friend’s name. The changes left him feeling helpless and estranged.

  He looked at the map on the wall and was grateful for the extra time of clarity Zelint’s AZ-1166 had given him. He knew this particular drug that was being tested had been discovered, synthesized, compounded from a tiny rare plant that he had found deep in the jungle. It brought a sense of ownership, of pride.

  He’d lived a life of adventure, of never allowing himself to fall in love or establish a home. A life where he traveled deeper and deeper into Amazonia, always searching for natural plant curatives.

  There were months spent in semi-darkness, under the umbrella of trees, months when he rarely saw the sun, where his aloneness brought him face-to-face with his own primal drive for survival—times of horrible hallucinations, that in the end, brought insight into his own tortured soul.

  Those were the times spent with the people who lived in the forests, who spoke little or no English. But it was the kind of life that had taught him to finally surrender his trust to strangers, to people who blended with their environment, left few or no footprints on the fragile surface of the earth. His life depended not only on their kindness, but their knowledge. Their humanity kept him alive. He never thought of it then, as he moved deeper into the interior, but if they’d left him, had not healed him the times he’d been bitten by poisonous creatures, he would have died while wandering alone through the massive forests. And that death would have been a lot more painful than the crotch rot that plagued him every day.

  He’d planned on a life where he would always be a seeker. Then one day everything went wrong.

  Zelint made sure he was placed in the double-blind study, made sure he got the real medication and not the placebo. He was grateful for every moment of clarity the test drug had given him.

  * * *

  Gina was at the nurses’ station, typing updates in the patients’ computer charts, when Rocky entered and pulled up a chair next to her. “I don’t see the vitals for the patients from this morning,” she said to the orderly.

  “I haven’t put them in the computer, that’s why.”

  “What do you have for Derek Kopek’s BP?”

  He flipped out a pad, opened it. “One-fifty over one hundred.”

  The tension in Gina’s neck was like a rubber band about to snap. “Did you pull those numbers out of the air? “I got two hundred over one-thirty!”

  “What’s the difference,” he said, “the man’s gonna check out any minute. Why are you busting my balls?”

  “Did you ever hear of medical management? The docs might change his meds; do something to make him more comfortable.”

  She watched him bite back a retort.

  She tapped a few keys and opened Derek Kopek’s chart.

  Strange—Derek started out with his congestive heart failure barely symptomatic. In a ridiculously short time, he’s gone from Stage One to Stage Four.

  Scanning further through his history, Gina saw that the admitting MD, Ethan Dayton, had listed Derek’s occupation as a Biologist, with a sub-specialty in herbal medicine.

  He wasn’t kidding. He did spend most of his life searching through the Amazon looking for plants that could be tested for potential therapies.

  “Did you know Mr. Kopek is a scientist?” she said to Rocky. “That he worked for Zelint, the company running the drug study?”

  “Was a scientist,” Rocky said with a sneer. “Now he’s only a dead man.”

  “Why are you working with sick people if you only have contempt for them?”

  He stood and took a long body stretch. “Same as you. M-O-N-E-Y!”

  * * *

  After dinner, Derek sat at his window smoking one of the two cigarettes he allowed himself each day. He knew the tobacco only made things worse—breathing became more difficult and his chest felt as if it was sinking into his spine. But he loved the feeling nicotine gave him. And what did it matter? His time was almost gone anyway. There simply was no other pleasure he was capable of now except inhaling the fumes of a cigarette.

  He watched the sun go down behind the boulders. As dusk evolved through its darkening shades of blue, and the sky turned to jet black covered with a smattering of stars, he thought back to his nights in the Amazon.

  Deep in the jungles, he never saw the heavens—the wide umbrella of trees in the dense forest gave a different night sky, a different world. It was a place of pungent smells, of a healthy, fertile earth filled with luxuriant growth. He’d been a lucky man to feel the planet breathe around him, engulf him with its splendor.

  He could see it all, alive in his dreamy memories:

  The copper-skinned woman returned, as she did so many nights, and crawled into his sleeping bag. Her smooth, hot skin trembled as his hand slid across her body and into her moistness. Her strong legs surrounded him then, and even now he could still feel her soft breasts burning through his chest, feel his groin fill with the heat of passion.

  He jolted awake. Someone was in his room. After a moment or two, he recognized Rocky, and the other orderly, Pete, standing near the door, whispering to each other.

  “What’s the matter, Rocky?” Derek’s voice was breathless, and a sharp pain clutched his chest.

  “See you fell asleep smokin’ again,” Rocky said. Both orderlies laughed as they walked to his bedside. “The doc ordered some medication to make you feel better.”

  Derek was puzzled, couldn’t make any sense of it. Pete reached down and took his arm, stretched it out straight for Rocky to jab in a needle.

  * * *

  The lights were bright when Derek opened his eyes. His chest was heavy and he felt sick to his stomach. Pete and Rocky were lifting him onto a table, an icy cold table.

  “What am I … doing … here?”

  “It’s okay,” said another voice. “Remember me, Derek? Dr. Dayton?”

  Derek looked at the man’s head floating above him.

  “Yes. I remember … you. What … am I … doing here?” Was there a vice clamped around his chest? He almost couldn’t speak.

  “There are a few last tests I have to do for the study you’ve been on.” Ethan leaned close and spoke in his ear. “We’re both scientists, so I know you’ll understand how important it is to get all the data we possibly can.”

  Derek turned his head from side to side, examined the room.

  There were large jars of human brains floating in preservatives. The containers were everywhere. He then realized he was on an autopsy table. A scale hung over him, and off to one side, near his head, was a tray of instruments, including a small saw.

  I need to go. Get out of here.

  He tried to move his arms but they were cuffed to the table. He wanted to fight but an overwhelming weakness left him helpless.

  Rocky
and Pete both snickered.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, get out of here, you two!” Ethan snapped. “You’re disgusting. I’ll call for you if I need you.”

  “Why am … I … here?”

  “As I was saying, Derek, this is only to get final brain function data. I will be examining your cerebral signals for answers that can only come from living cells.”

  “Living … cells?”

  “Yes. Serious questions remain—like why AZ-1166 has caused age-related diseases to go into hyper drive in so many subjects.”

  “Many … of whom?”

  The doctor was obviously annoyed with him. His sunken eyes burned through Derek.

  “Study subjects. People like you,” Ethan said.

  Derek tried to follow the doctor’s thin lips, but he had trouble understanding the jumble of words.

  “I’m going to give you more medication. It will lessen the discomfort.”

  “Let me go back to my room … let me go … please!”

  “It’ll all be over soon, Derek.”

  The doctor reached out, jabbed his arm with another needle and everything turned into a blur. He closed his eyes and when he opened them, he saw the doctor was holding—what? A scalpel?

  Before he could process the information, excruciating pain tore across the top of his head and a searing burn spread out and raced down his neck.

  “STOPSTOPSTOPSTOP.”

  The doctor’s face peered down at him again. “It’s all right, Derek. We’re almost there.”

  “PLEEEASE!”

  Before he could grab another breath, he heard the sound of the saw.

  Chapter 15

  Searching through the computer records, Harry found the records for all the participants in his unit … they had successfully completed the AZ-1166 study’s requirement. Their status had been reclassified—in remission. In remission? Ethan said these patients were failures, here only for medical treatment associated with having taken the test drug

  But why were they even here at Comstock? There were no special treatments that Harry could see. Most of the people here had crippling arthritis and were taking medication for their pain. Couldn’t they do that in a home environment? A nursing home?