A TEST OF SURVIVAL

C H A P T E R 2 (continued)
Gretchen squeezed her palms together under the ledge of his massive walnut desk. “Herb. I don’t want you closing me up if you find lymph node involvement, or liver. I don’t want the old heave-ho, go-home-to-die speech. Clear it out of me. It’s the only goddamn chance I’ve got.”

He stared at her, considering. “Okay. Your call. But think about it, all right? We dig around, yank out too much and all we’ll be doing is making your recovery time longer and harder.”

Gretchen nodded obediently and pushed on, telling Porterman that she wanted him to excise a piece of her tumor, keep it viable in a transport media, and send it to California for an ex vivo assay to identify which of the many chemotherapy drugs might be most active against her cancer.

Herb Porterman barely waited her out as she explained what she knew about ex vivo.

“Are you nuts?” he said. He waved a hand, struggled with himself and tried again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. But, Christ, woman, are you nuts? You want to smear your tumor around in ... in some petri dish, and you’ll go along with it, with whatever drug supposedly works, and to hell with clinical trials? Where’s your head?”

Gretchen Judd was ill-prepared to argue the science with him. Until the word ‘cancer’ was aimed at her, she would have agreed with Porterman. The technology Gus Ephraim now called ex vivo had been summarily dismissed from medical school curriculums as a failed experiment of the seventies. A day earlier, Gretchen had reached Wisconsin’s cancer guru, Dr. Lyman Deering of the King Cancer Center, who brusquely told her he could pour bleach on cancer in the test tube and it would die, but human medicine required human research. If ex vivo was any good, Dr. Deering said, there would have been a clinical trial proving it. Yet if Gretchen knew anyone in this life she knew her ex-husband, since she was fourteen she had known him, and Gus would not be devoting his considerable intellect to a losing science. He appeared to be risking everything on it.

“My son wants me to try this, Herb. What can it hurt at this point? It’s just tissue that would be discarded. If the pathologist agrees to send it out there, what do you care?”

* * *

The morphine pump delivered one last dose. No more narcotic to be tapped for awhile. Gretchen relaxed, ready to follow it down.

A pencil scratched against paper. Alta and her sketch pad.

“Alta? You still here?”

“Of course. Can’t get rid of me so easily.”

Gretchen’s mother had been dead for a decade; she considered Alta better at the job anyway. “We shoulda bought a first-class seat for it,” Gretchen said. “For my tumor. The California part. You know. Bribe it.”

The pencil stopped scratching.

“C’mon,” Gretchen urged, sluggishly. “You’re the jingle-jangle writer. Always making Leo laugh. So the tumor’s riding a big bird. A jumbo jet. And we wanna make it happy. Help.”

Chair creaking. “Well,” Alta said. “Rich people to chew on, maybe. A movie, free cocktails -”

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “Bloody Marys. Teensy glasses.”

Feet on the floor, walking, stopping. Her cheek, finger-brushed.

“Gretchen, dear. Why are we bribing it, again?”

“So it will die,” Gretchen whispered. “So Gus will find me a drug to make it fucking die.”