“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.”
“You kind of contradicted yourself there, chief.”
“What I’m saying,” he explains, “is that we’re going to have to make sure you’re scheduled for your scans and that there’s some reason why you’re in there long enoug
h to get everything we need. I’ve already come up with something that should fit the bill, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to give you a sample of hydroxyzine,” he says. “It’s an anti-anxiety medication. One of the side effects is restless leg syndrome. We’re going to want to do a blood draw with it in your system just to be on the safe side, but we’ll do that before your scans so we can make sure that it’s under control before you actually go in, as we do want to get clear scans, and that’s never going to happen if your lower body’s jerking the whole time.”
“So you’re going to put me on a drug that I don’t need so that we have a cause for a side effect that I’m not actually going to develop because you’re going to give me something else to counteract it before we take the scans that we’re going to use to provide a history to fraudulently get me into the trial?” I ask.
“I know, it sounds overboard, but we’re-” he starts.