“It looks pretty rickety,” I tell her.
“Don’t worry, doc. I’ve had my tetanus shot.”
As I’m walking up the creaking metal stairs, I mutter, “I’m more worried about the thing collapsing on us.”
Even with my trepidation, it doesn’t seem like we’d be in too much trouble even if the ride were to fall apart with us on it, so I follow her into one of the cars.
The metal is cold as we sit down, but she was right about one thing: the view is pretty idyllic.
“Isn’t it funny how even a slight change of perception can make everything look so different?” I ask.
“Pretty cool, huh?” she returns.
We sit for a while, looking up at the sky.
There aren’t too many lights around here, so the stars are out in force. I’m trying to find constellations to point out to her, but it occurs to me that I only know how to find the big and little dippers.
It’s cold, especially on this metal seat, so I put my arm around her shoulders as she huddles closer to me.
“You know,” I say, “while you were in that building, I got a text message.”
“What’d it say?” she asks, huddling up next to me for warmth.
“It was from Melissa’s boss,” I tell her. “I think it’s safe to say that whatever’s been going on between the two of them has been going on for a while now, and I really don’t think there’s any reason to believe it’s going to be over any time soon.”
“Fuck her, anyway,” Grace says, shivering next to me. “You don’t need someone who’s going to treat you that way.”
“I think I’m starting to realize that.”
Grace looks up at me and smiles. “Come on,” she says. “There’s something that I really want to show you.”
She gets out of the car and starts walking back down the stairs. It takes me a little longer to get out of the car than it took her, but soon enough, I catch up to her.
“I can’t believe you’ve never been here,” Grace says, walking about half a step ahead of me. “Back in college, I used to get drunk out here with some frat guys.”
“Were you in a sorority?”
“No, I was too young. Apparently, they don’t like to let anyone in unless they’re old enough to go for a beer run. Besides, sorority chicks are bitches.”
“Is it weird that I’ve only ever heard that from women who never made it into a sorority?” I ask.
“Not particularly,” she answers and stops walking. Grace turns to look at me and, grabbing my hand, she tells me, “We’re almost there.”
I walk with her or, rather, I walk as she pulls me behind her, her grip surprisingly strong for how little strength she must have right now.
“There,” she says, pointing into the darkness.
It takes a minute for me to spot it, but there looming ahead of us is an old Ferris wheel, its dark metal blending in with the night sky.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asks.
The words I’m thinking at the moment are more along the lines of “unsafe” or “terrifying,” but Grace’s almost innocent look of awe and excitement is enough for me to bite my tongue.
“It really is,” I tell her. “How did you know this place was still here, anyway?”
“People never move a graveyard unless they absolutely have to, and this one’s still collecting bodies. Come on,” she says and starts walking toward the Ferris wheel.
“Where are we going? I seriously doubt that thing’s still got power running to it.”
“Oh, there’s no way. That’s why we’re going to climb.”
Even if I weren’t a doctor, I’d still know this is a bad idea.
“I really don’t think we should,” I tell her.
“And why’s that?” she asks, continuing to walk toward the base of the old ride. “It’s there and we’re here. What’s the problem?”
“For one thing,” I start as I catch up with Grace, “that thing’s falling apart. For another thing, it’s dark. Even if the whole structure doesn’t come toppling down, we’re going to have a hell of a time getting onto any of the cars without falling. For another-”
“I’m sure you have a long list of reasons not to,” she interrupts, “but have you ever stopped to consider the reasons that you should?”
“Like what?” I ask, stepping between her and the rungs of the built-in ladder.
“It’s frightening,” she says. “Isn’t that reason enough?”
“Jumping out of an airplane without a parachute would be frightening,” I tell her, “but that doesn’t mean that you should do it.”
“That’s completely different. This is the one thing that I never did when I was tooling around here with the guys. If it can hold half a dozen football and lacrosse players spread throughout the top three or four cars, I know for a fact it can hold the two of us. Now come on, get out of my way.”
“Grace,” I say, putting my back against the metal rungs, “you’re not ready for this.”
“I’m fine,” she says. “I’m great at climbing shit.”
“I believe you,” I tell her, “but you’re not there right now. You can’t do this.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you needed my help getting over the fence,” I answer.
I feel like an asshole saying it, but it needed to be said. Idealism or not, people have physical boundaries and a person on chemo, even the kind of dose and frequency Grace is on, tend to reach those boundaries a lot faster than the rest of us.
She’s not saying anything, and she’s not making a play to get around me. With that sentence, however honest, however necessary, I feel like I’ve done what the diagnosis and the treatment hadn’t been able to do: I’ve put a crack in her spirit.
“I’m sorry, Grace,” I tell her. “Let’s get you through this round of chemo, and when you’ve got some more of your strength back, I’ll come back here with you and we’ll climb up there together. What do you say?”
She’s still not saying anything and it’s killing me.
I’ve had to tell patients a lot of difficult things in the short time I’ve been an oncologist, but I never would have expected that something so bizarre and clearly beyond her present capability would feel just as bad as any prognosis I’ve uttered.
“It’s fine,” she says in a tiny voice. “I was just kidding.”
“Yeah?” I ask, doing my best to hide the fact that I can see, hear, and feel her deepening realization that’s she’s just that sick.
“Yeah,” she says. “I mean what kind of freak breaks into and old scrap yard of amusement park rides to climb to the top of the Ferris wheel? Of course, I’m joking.”
“I meant what I said,” I tell her. “In a couple of weeks, before your next round, I’ll come back here with you and we’ll make it to that top car together, okay?”
“You’re not listening to me,” she says coldly. “I told you that I was making a joke. I’m obviously too weak to do that now, and even if I wasn’t, it would be a monumentally stupid idea, anyway. Can we just go?”
“There’s other stuff we can find,” I tell her. “We just got here.”
“It’s getting late,” she says. “I’m getting tired. That chemo just drags it out of you, doesn’t it?”
“Okay,” I tell her, “I’ll take you home, then.”
I did the right thing, and I know that. Even she knows that, but it doesn’t change the fact that what’s going on in her body just became a whole lot more real than it ever was before.
As a doctor, this is an important thing, though rarely a pleasant experience for anyone involved. False hope only leads to a harder crash, and as tempting as it can be to let a person think they’re doing better than they are or that their treatment isn’t taking as much out of them as they’d like to believe, the right thing to do is be straightforward and take the hit sooner.
It’s better in the long run.
But it’s in this moment that I realize that I’ve been doing the sa
me thing that Grace wanted to do in climbing to the top of that Ferris wheel. I’ve been pretending that it’s still okay that I’m her doctor — that the friendship we’re developing or whatever else it may turn into down the road isn’t going to affect my judgment when it comes to her treatment.
Today, I received a group email from the dean of medicine at the hospital regarding a new clinical trial and I already know that I’m going to sign her up for it. That wouldn’t be a big deal if it weren’t for the fact that the trial is specifically for oligodendroglioma patients who have lived with the diagnosis or are otherwise known to have had the condition for at least five years, for whom chemo and radiation have had little to no impact.
I told myself I’d just be taking my first step back toward being true to myself, doing what I know to be right regardless of how it looks to others. Now, though, it’s starting to set in that my growing affection for Grace, this patient of mine, has just put me in a position to lose my job, possibly my license to practice medicine.
Administrators don’t look too kindly on falsifying medical records to get a patient into a trial and that’s what I’m going to have to do to make it happen.
Still, though, as I catch up to her, trying to cheer her up, I know the damage is already done. I can’t stand to see that look on her face again, and I’m going to do whatever I can to make sure I don’t have to.
“Grace,” I start, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
Chapter Nine
Under the Radar
Grace
It’s been a week since Jace told me about the clinical trial.
At first, I was just thrilled that there might be something that could change the course of the rest of my life, but once he let slip what he would have to do to get me in, I tried to back out of it.
I know what kind of a risk he’s taking in doing what he’s doing, but he had a point when he told me that while chemo may extend my life, though there are no guarantees on even that; without some other intervening factor, chances are I’ve already lived more than half my life.
That’s a hell of a motivator.
He’s coming over tonight and we’re going to go over the kinds of things I’m going to have to know when I give “my history” to the doctors running the trial.
Right now, Yuri’s here, keeping me company.
We’ve gotten pretty close over the last while, and it’s nice to have someone who’s not an employee to share my thoughts and feelings with. It helps that she’s almost as crazy as I am.
“So, are you going to go through with it?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I think I have to. I know it’s a risk for the doc, but with my life actually hanging in the balance-”
“It’s not the risk to him that I’m worried about,” Yuri says. “Okay, he’s my boss and if he loses his license, I lose my job. And, of course, I actually respect him and I would hate to see something bad happen to him, but Grace, I’ve seen countless patients who’ve gone through clinical trials. Sometimes they come out the other side better off for their inclusion, but a lot of times it goes the other way.”
“Well, if it weren’t safe, they wouldn’t test it on people, would they?”
“They wouldn’t knowingly test a drug they knew to be more harmful than helpful,” she answers. “At least, that’s what I like to think, but you’ve got to understand that you’re in one of the very first test groups for this drug. There’s a lot they don’t know about it.”
“It’s worth a shot, though,” I tell her. “If anything goes the wrong way, they’ll take me off of it, right?”
“Yeah, but a lot of times, they don’t know that something’s going the wrong way until it’s already past the point of no return. You could lose years of your life or you could develop new symptoms, symptoms that may or may not respond to treatment. I just want to make sure you’re going into this with all of the facts.”
“Hey, on the bright side, they might put me on the placebo,” I laugh, trying to cover my trepidation.
“That’s true,” she says, “but in that case, you’re going to be risking Dr. Churchill’s job, reputation, and license over something that’s not actually going to help you.”
“So you don’t think I should do it?”
“I’m not saying that,” she says. “I’m just saying that I want you to be prepared that this might not go the way you’re hoping it will, the way Dr. Churchill and I are hoping it will.”
There’s a knock on the door, and I get up to answer it.
“He’s probably going to tell you a lot of what I’ve been telling you,” Yuri says, “but I can’t be sure of that.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell me?” I ask.
“I know he’s got a soft spot when it comes to you. He likes you, and I wanted to make absolutely certain that somebody told you the things you need to know before you make a firm commitment to this.”
“Are you staying? He knows we’re friends, it’s all right.”
“I’ll say hi,” she says, “but I think I should leave the two of you to go over the details — plausible deniability and all that.”
“Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll call you later and let you know how it goes.”
She nods and gets to the door. Answering it, she says, “She’s inside. Don’t sugarcoat this.”
“I won’t,” Jace answers. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Yuri.”
The door closes and I’m sitting down again when he comes into the room.
“She knows that she can’t be seen to have had any part of this, right?” I ask him.
“Of course,” he says. “The last thing I’d want to do would be to put her at risk with what we’re doing.”
“So tell me,” I start, “what kind of results have other trials of this drug had?”
“There’s not a lot of data yet,” he says. “An earlier form of the drug was recalled before trials were over because it was shown to actually cause patients with grade two oligodendroglioma to progress to grade three.”
“I’m guessing that’s the wrong direction?” I ask, knowing very well what grade three means. It means that my chance of being alive in five years would be cut in half.
“Yeah,” he says. “They did another trial of this version of the drug, and it’s shown some improvement in over sixty percent of patients, thirty percent over placebo.”
“That’s so weird,” I muse.
“What’s that?”
“That thirty percent of people get better when they’re told they’re getting something that would make them better,” I tell him. “Maybe you should start handing out sugar pills along with your other treatments.”
“The problem with the placebo effect,” he explains, “is that it usually doesn’t last for any significant period of time. After a while, patients stop making the improvements and they return to where they were before they were on placebo in the first place.”
“Still,” I tell him, “that’s got to buy some time at least, right?”
“Grace, there are some things I need you to know when it comes to trials like this one,” he starts.
“Yuri filled me in.”
“What’d she say?”
“That these drugs are experimental, that there’s no guarantee that they’re going to help or even that I’m going to be on the real drug. She told me that sometimes the drug actually makes things worse and could end up costing me a lot of the time I have left,” I answer.
“Yeah,” he says, “that’s all true. Another thing I need to tell you is that at the end of the trial, even if you are improving, assuming that you are on the real drug, they’re more than likely going to take you off of it. The best we can hope for here is that the drug makes an improvement in your condition significant enough that it’s more likely to be eradicated or suppressed longer by your other treatment.”
“Am I still going to be on chemo?”
“No,” he says. “You’ve had your last chemo treatment for a while.”
“But I will go back to it no matter what?”
“I think that’s the most realistic scenario,” he tells me. “Chances of complete remission, even if this drug does exactly what it’s supposed to, are very slim. I just wanted you to know that before we go any further with this.”
“Are you scared?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re putting a lot on the line getting me into this trial,” I tell him. “Yeah, I’m the one having an experimental drug put in my body, but I’m not the only one who’s risking something here.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I haven’t really thought about that part of it that much.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” I chortle. “You know that?”
“Actually I do,” he answers. “Now, I’ve called in a favor from one of my old professors — he’s still a practicing oncologist. I told him the situation and, after a great deal of convincing and assuring him that I’d owe him a few favors in return, he agreed to act as the diagnosing doctor in your case.”
“How’s that going to work?” I ask. “Are you just going to copy my newer scans and say they’re my older scans?”
“That’s part of it,” Jace says, “but we’re going to have to give you five years’ worth of scans and that in itself has risks.”
“What?” I ask, “Are you saying I might get radiation poisoning or something?”
“No,” he answers. “MRIs don’t use ionizing radiation. In fact, they’re safe enough. We will do a CT scan, but only one. The risk is that we get caught while we’re doing this. The biggest risk, at this point anyway, is that I get caught altering the dates on your scans.”
“How do you do that, anyway?”
“It’s simple enough,” he answers, “but the problem is that the hospital archives hold the records for all scans. The date on the film itself may be changed, but the file itself, at least in the hospital’s database will show the date and time the scans were actually made.”
“So we’re fucked right out of the gate,” I sigh.
“Not necessarily,” he answers. “Without any reason for someone to go looking through your scans, they’re never going to see the discrepancy. That’s why we’ve got to do everything by the book, even while we’re not.”
Costars (A Standalone Romance Novel) (New York City Bad Boy Romance) Page 35