“Your data is useless!”
He allowed a sinister grin to invade his elderly face.
“As if you didn’t know already... There is no cure for anything. It’s but a mere illusion...”
“ That is not true! You know it not to be true!” she screamed through the tears.
Yes, Professor Larkin knew that to be a lie, and he knew this lie to be the best way to incite his much younger colleague into fighting for her patient’s life. He had underestimated her potential for destruction while overestimating her good intentions.
The old man trembled at his words. He lay on a dirty bed, agonizing in the pains of death by the will of the ever-multiplying sick cells in his weary body. It was quite obvious that his organism was at war with itself. The worst that could have happened would have been the presence of some external factor to quicken the obvious ending.
Testicular cancer had allowed revelation long before. He had never paid attention to the signs. There was always somebody else to blame, and he still could not understand how his need of self-exoneration from mistakes had brought him so close to the end.
“For 11 months have you spoonfed me this garbage...”
He barely spoke, yet he spoke with the fury of the forgotten.
“...only to tell me this...” he paused only to cough, and his body appeared revived in brutal convulsions while the blood drops stained the white tiles of the room. “...now...”
Shirley gasped.
“Your learning needs produce innocent victims, my dear,” observed Professor Larkin, a touch of cynicism appearing to drown his good intentions.
He had not known her hidden means. Neither had he known the theory she avidly wished to prove correct, but by the will of a greater force, for a single moment, he was able to foresee the worst.
She covered her mouth, eager to choke the angry words that fought to evade.
“But... B17...” she eventually whispered.
She knew it to be poison. She had known from the beginning. Her desperate attempt at proving her own belief correct had sped up the disease of her patient. It had caused the illness to spread,, metastasizing to all important organs within several weeks only. She had killed a man, although he was still alive, hanging by a thread, blaming her for his lost battle.
Larkin saw fit to twist the knife in her wounds. He could guess that something was very wrong.
“There’s not an ounce of ethics in your blood, is there?” he asked, taken aback by his sharp question.
Shirley shot her patient a disappointed look.
Of course it did not hurt her to have murdered a man, no! It sickened her to think that her theory was false.
“I will... Continue testing...” she muttered, completely disheartened.
She could feel desperation invading her veins. She had failed.
The sick came from a rather poor family. Luckily, he benefited from a health insurance which kept him in a hospital bed with a minimum waste of money.
Nevertheless, he had paid the doctor he idolized for her wonderful efforts at bringing him back from the dead. Yes, he had been feeling dead ever since the illness had been discovered. But now he felt alive with anger.
‘Don’t tell anyone!’ she had advised him on the day she had prescribed the poison-drug. ‘You will not find it on the market. I tell you, however, that it is a life-saver.’
If only he had not taken her word! But noninvasive treatment had sounded great, and the decision had been made on the spur of the moment. Yes, he would beat the illness! So he had believed... He hadn’t. If anything, he had facilitated its evolution.
‘It’s completely natural, I tell you,’ she had assured him. ‘You have to understand that I wish to save you. Otherwise, I would just watch you withering away.’
She had seemed so honest, so touched by his drama, so... humane.
As warned, he had not managed to find the drug in pharmacies. He had acquired it online, from an obscure website, covering the entire cost of the deal. Health insurances do not cover ghost cancer-killing medicines.
It had brought him a sparkle of hope, this wonder medicine. He had previously even thought of going to a monastery, of praying to miracle-bringing icons, of doing whatever was necessary to survive.
A new reality had just been revealed to his sickly eyes.
As he lay, he watched the scene with no words left. He was soon going to die.
“B17?” Larkin exploded. “What are you talking about?”
Shirley wished to dismiss him with only a hand movement.
“B17, Shirley? Did you even know what you were subjecting this man to?”
A mad flicker livened her black eyes.
“I don’t think this is the proper moment or location to discuss the issue,” she concluded, slamming the door behind her.
Presented as a vitamin, the pseudo-cure had been promoted as a cancer cure for years. Studies had proved it not only clinically ineffective, but also dangerously toxic.
Shirley had known that too well, and her patient could only now understand that he had been used. She had introduced the cure under the name of amygdalin, leaving aside important aspects like the hydrogen-cyanide produced by its metabolism.
Ingestion of purified amygdalin can cause severe toxicity and death due to cyanide poisoning. Numerous case reports in medical literature described serious cyanide poisoning in patients who ingested laetrile as a cancer treatment. Shirley had overlooked this, and while her dying patient lacked sophisticated medical knowledge, a sort of sinister gut feeling told him that all side-effects had been no mystery to his doctor.
But Shirley had been planning such tests for years. She had not chosen only him, for many had lived to see the same fate in complete unawareness.
She assumed that their bodies were too weak, that they missed something, that there was a detail only that required discovery to make her dream come true. She wished to prove the whole world wrong, driven by the obsession of having lost her brother to the same illness, in the same circumstances. Her profession had not yet proved itself useful.
Meanwhile, the old man hanged by his very last minutes as Larkin stared at the passers-by from the large window of the room.
“That must be why nothing else worked on him...”
The rain started. People began to gather under the roof of a shop, on the side opposite to the hospital gates.
Larkin watched them powerlessly, his mind decoding the scenery quite differently than usual. He could only see illness, he could only see dead cells, gathering, gathering, growing, like tumors, like cancer they multiplied and the crowd never ceased to become larger. It was all in his mind.
“I can’t save him either...” he blabbered frantically after glancing shortly at the dying patient. He looked at his hands, the hands that had saved so many, the hands that had brought a monster into his life, the hands that had offered her the papers to be signed, a contract, a future, all rewarded with ...this.
Shirley returned, as serene as ever.
“Are you coming to lunch?” she inquired.
They always lunched together, discussing theories and planning campaigns to aid the poor sick people who afforded no medical care. She was a stranger in his eyes.
“I’m going...” she insisted
The old man reached out a trembling hand, wishing to grab the white coat that had given her the halo of an angel on their every encounter.
A sudden, fugitive thought had crossed his mind: Blood cyanide concentrations may be measured as a means of confirming the diagnosis in hospitalized patients or to assist in the forensic investigation of a fatal overdose. He could not have put it in these words, but he could have explained it in layman’s terms, if only life would have spared him for several other minutes. He wished to at least know that justice would be done.
The morbid silence was suddenly cut across by the hysterical sound of the heart rate monitor.
“Weakling!” Shirley screamed possessed at the lifeless cancer victim.
Larkin knew that this would be the end of him. Had the media found out, his hospital would be in ruins. He would not watch people from a hospital window during a break... He would watch convicts from behind prison bars.
“You’ve destroyed me!” he whispered, struggling to appear calm.
“I have not destroyed you. You’re being silly!” Shirley exploded in a rush of anger. “Suppose my theory proves itself correct in the end, you will be famous. Don’t blame me for trying to make history! What is this? A dead man whose relatives do not afford to pay for additional tests. From what they know, it was cancer that killed him, not me! Above all, he was a martyr. One day, he will have the opportunity to be regarded so...”
“How many?” Larkin inquired with an adamant expression on his wrinkled face.
“Enough, yet not enough, apparently.”
“Were they all poor people, Shirley?”
The woman smiled innocently.
“All! You can tell from their clothes, from their speech, from their shy, respectful behavior.”
She guessed that he had been captivated and entranced by the prospective fame and fortune.
“For how long has this been happening?”
She took the time to think of the past several years. She couldn’t even remember all their faces, although some ghostly images unfolded within her mind at the speed of light and she could barely distinguish one from the other.. She felt sorry for a moment, and her cheeks were invaded by blood.
“Enough, yet not enough, apparently. We will need as much time as we can get. This is a wonderful opportunity. And... And ... Look! You can even rule out the potential placebo effect! Believe me when I tell you that he believed in this with all his might.”
Larkin coughed silently, betraying a certain emotion and wishing to cover a certain disgust.
“Did he pay you anything?”
“As in - bribe?”
“Yes.”
“Well, sure he did... You can see why this is wonderful, right? It’s all in our favor!” she concluded heroically, as if she was doing the greatest service to humanity, ridding the world of the poor due to the fact that they were sick.
Larkin turned his back on her for a moment. He browsed his pockets frantically, until his right hand settled, grabbing the object that had put him through such emotional strain. Yes, it was all in his favor.
“No, I can’t see why it’s all wonderful...” he spoke calmly, making for the door.
Shirley was caught unprepared. Her feelings were stirred up once more.
“Weakling!” she yelled after him, as Larkin shut the door and turned the key.
Finally free, in the middle of the empty hallway, at approximately 4 a.m., Professor Larkin was free of a terrible burden. He took the cell phone out of his pocket, pressed the “stop recording” button, and dialed : 9-1-1.
