November 2009 Archives

I soon fell into a routine of being taken to 38P sessions every three days at 4:30 pm sharp.  I assumed that since the drug was not very powerful, it would have to be administered more often than conventional chemotherapy.  Whatever the reason, the frequent treatments turned out to be a blessing.  Any break in the day-to-day monotony of life in the ward was a welcome diversion.

It was the morning after my fourth treatment.  I was lying in bed staring upward, looking for patterns in the ceiling tiles but finding none.  My view became obstructed by the smiling face of Jason the Christian orderly looking down at me saying it was time to get up.

"You guys juiced me yesterday," I said.

"That's not why I'm here," he said.  "You progressive counseling starts today.

"I don't want to talk to a counselor.  I want to talk to my wife."

"I believe that's what they have in mind."

He helped me up and we walked out of the ward.  I didn't ask him about the religious comic that was under my pillow.  I had overheard talk of even more attacks on hospitals and clinics recently and anyone on the staff who showed even the slightest religious leanings was no doubt under suspicion. 

I assumed he put it there but not because there was any evidence that he had.  I just wanted to believe he was responsible because I liked the guy and I appreciated the gesture.  There was some rebellion in it and I needed some rebellion in my life, more than anything.    

The comic itself was long gone by now, torn into unidentifiable pieces each disposed of discreetly by stuffing into a number of bedpan payloads.

"I can't believe I'm going to be able to talk to my wife," I said.

"If you had some faith, you'd be amazed what you are able to do," Jason said.

"That has never been my strong suit.  Faith I mean."

"That's not surprising.  It is in out nature to doubt and we do so until circumstances compel us to look beyond our suspicions."

I told him I would keep that in mind.  I made a mental note to put in a kind word for him when I talked to Heidi.  He deserved that.  For everyone else here, my words would be far less kind.

We arrived at a door with the sign "Progressive Counseling Room B."  Jason wished me a good day and left.

I opened the door hoping to find Heidi.  She wasn't in the room.  No one was.  All I could see was a table and a chair.  On top of the table were an envelope, letter stationery, and a pen.

"Welcome Richard," said a woman's voice coming from a speaker somewhere in the room.  "It is our understanding that you and your wife are very close."

"Who's asking?"

"My name is Dr. Nadine Carlson."

"Well Dr. Nadine Carlson, yes we are.  You are absolutely right."

Dr. Carlson then apologized that I had not had the chance to write my wife earlier.  She said that starting today, that situation would be remedied with an hour set aside from my busy schedule each week to correspond with Heidi.

"We have found that domestic stability gives a real boost to the progressive-counseling process," she added.

There were perhaps a dozen sheets of stationery on the table.  I would only need one.  I wrote:

My Dearest Heidi,

Get me the hell out of here.  I am being held prisoner and am subjected to some crazed Nazi medical experiment.  I'm not joking.  Bring the police if you have to, just...

"Richard," Dr. Carlson's voice interrupted.  "That is hardly appropriate.  This supposed to be a letter to your wife, not a paranoid screed to be posted on some conspiracy-theory message board."

I looked back over my shoulder.  There was a security camera on the ceiling, its red LED blinking in disapproval.

"What we are trying to accomplish here is to create an atmosphere of a shared positive experience and I feel you are being both uncooperative and selfish.   Think about what your wife must be going through."

I then heard another voice from the speaker.  This one was Heidi's.

"My life has been so hectic lately."

I was about to say something until I realized that this was a recording from Heidi's visit.  They must have had our meeting room bugged.  They probably listened in on all our phone conversations as well.

I relented and said I would try again.  I took another sheet of stationery from the stack and wrote a new letter.  I told Heidi how much better I was feeling every day.  I told her how my new accommodations allowed me to make a lot of new friends.  If a sentiment was positive enough to make me throw up in my mouth a little, it went into that letter.

I then put down the pen and leaned forward to where I thought my body would block the camera's view of the page.  With my fingernail, I scratched "HELP ME" so it was indented in the sheet of paper.

"What do you think now?" I asked after sitting back in my chair.

A few moments passed.

"Much better," Dr. Carlson said.  "You see?  That wasn't so hard.  Go ahead and put the letter in the envelope and we'll mail it for you."

Thank you, Dr. Nadine Carlson, I thought.  Thank you very much indeed.

 

I read through the rest of the comic.  It didn't go into great detail about how I wound up in hell, only that I had failed to demonstrate my faith in God when called upon to perform one simple task.

The final panel showed Heidi in heaven, brushing away a tear because I could not join her there.  Her breasts defied gravity as her back arched in her long flowing robe.  A hand with a hole in it reached in from the edge of the picture, either to console her or cop a feel.

Whoever put this under my pillow took a big chance by doing so.  Such activity would be frowned upon even under normal circumstances.  Getting caught doing it now would almost certainly result in getting fired and perhaps even arrested.

I soon learned that what happened in Michigan was not an isolated incident.

We patients were more or less oblivious to what was going on in the outside world but the staff was not and they weren't quiet about it.  One of them also left behind a copy of Newsweek.

From what I gathered, the GOD squad had been around for some time but were nowhere near as militant in the past.  They started as concerned parents who were upset with the medical establishment for a couple of reasons.  One was the unrealistic suspicion that pediatricians were giving their children birth control on the sly.  The other was the very realistic suspicion that these same doctors were reporting parents to Child Protective Services when there was evidence of beatings, even when done with a rod of correction.

Most of these kids were already home schooled so it wasn't too big a leap for their parents to decide they should be home doctored as well.  The parents had no medical training but armed with some common sense and sites like WebMD, they did pretty well much of the time.  The problem was when they didn't know enough to figure out why a child said he or she was feeling sick, they often gave a diagnosis of malingering.

By and large, kids are pretty tough.  Most were able to endure the prescribed double workload of chores and a whipping from dad's belt as a cure for what ailed them.  They were less resilient when what ailed them was something more serious like acute appendicitis.  In emergencies like these, the parents ditched their DIY ethic and sought the expertise of medical professionals.  Often, it was too late to save their kids.

The statistics spoke loud and clear.  Home-doctored children were far more likely to die under a physician's care than other kids.  Not only that, the recent increase in deaths just happened to coincide with the rise of publicly funded healthcare.

Most of the parents saw this as just another case of the government acting like jackbooted thugs and would deal with it the same way they had in the past.  They would stay vigilant, pray for guidance, and move further off the grid. 

There was a fringe element that decided that it was time to take action.  Arming themselves was an easy first hurdle since most of them owned guns to begin with.  After the midnight raid, the group publicly claimed responsibility and claimed there would be more to follow.

The Newsweek went to press the day after the Michigan attack, too early to cover the subsequent massacres in New Jersey, Kentucky, and Guam.  (Guam?)  For details on those incidents, the only information I could get was from overheard conversation.  They all seemed to be inside jobs, a patient went missing each time, there was blood everywhere etc.

I wanted to learn more but there was a reason they called this the Rationed Care Unit.  Other than the omnipresent nurse who never budged from her station, we were left to fend for ourselves for much of the day.  No doctors or nurses came by to look at our charts and ask how we were doing, and we were expected to bus our own bedpans and empty them in the large plastic container near the exit of the ward.

So except for the looming threat of being butchered by religious fanatics, the next couple of days were relatively uneventful.  I spent a fair amount of time lift Les' spirits but to no avail.  He looked OK physically, at least as OK as a man with no lower jaw could look, but there was something inside this place.

Madge continued to talk nonstop and it was an uphill battle trying to ignore her.  She carried on about the intrinsic evil of 38P and how the guilt of being involved with its creation drove her to substance abuse.  She added that it was a fitting irony that she herself was diagnosed with cancer not long after.  In the main wing, she was repeatedly caught trying to raid the pharmacy so they transferred her here where she must suffer in silence.

If only.

From what I had seen, 38P was anything but horrific.  When orderlies made an appearance, it was either to feed us or to escort one of the patients out for a chemo session.  When those patients returned to their beds, they looked no worse than when they left.  There was no collapsing, no vomiting, none of the symptoms on usually associates with chemotherapy.

My turn came around the third day I was in the ward.  They came for me in the late afternoon.  I was escorted down a corridor that must have run along one side of the building because there were no doors on one side of it except for a clearly marked emergency exit.

There was a door at the end of the corridor that opened to small room with a single chemo couch inside.  There was no TV showing Animal Planet here.  One other noticeable difference was that the armrests were equipped with leather straps.

The orderlies sat me down, strapped me in, and left.  A technician came in shortly after and hooked me to the IV unit and then left without saying a word.  I sat there wondering what this 38P stuff was going to do to me.  I waited for the onset of nausea and dizziness.  Neither happened. 

A couple of hours later, the technician returned, unhooked me, and told me I could return to the ward.  I asked if someone would be along to take me there.  He said no.

Walking back, I felt about as good as I did on the way there.  Not great, but I did have cancer and hadn't felt great in a very long time.  As I passed the emergency exit, the thought entered my head that I could go through it and make a dash for freedom.  But then what?  I'd be picked up and brought back here before I could make it to a phone to call Heidi.  I was in no condition for the great escape.

I got back to the ward and Madge was grinning at me.

"So now you've met my monster child, my shame," she said.

"You know, Madge," I said. "If you want to hate yourself, I'm not going to stop you.  But after a dose of your supposedly evil 38P, I feel better than I ever have right after chemo."

"There is a reason for that," she said.  "You see, the 'P' stands for parallel.  The 38th parallel is the border between North and South Korea."

"So?"

"You really are a dense one, Richard.  The two sides in that conflict never signed a peace treaty, only a ceasefire, so the war never really ended in any lasting sense.  The project I worked on so hard was to create a chemotherapy drug that achieves the same thing.  38P won't cure you, not even close.  It'll just fight the cancer enough so you won't die, you'll just keep going and going like a tumor-ridden Energizer Bunny."

"What if I refuse chemo?"

"You're a little late for that.  Mr. Haynee did the same thing and it earned him a ticket out of here.  No, they won't let that happen again.  They now send a detail of bully boys to make sure all of us take our medicine and unless..."

Madge didn't finish her thought, whatever it was.  She furrowed her brow for a moment, then shrugged and began to hum the M*A*S*H theme "Suicide Is Painless."