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."
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