Terminal

With his head still stabilized in the vise-like apparatus for the MRI, Howard was unaware of the technician’s presence until the man spoke.

“You okay?” he asked as he began to release Howard’s head.

“Okay,” Howard managed to reply. He was lying. His heart was thumping in terror. He was afraid of what the test would reveal. Behind a glass divider he could discern a group of white-coated individuals studying a CRT screen. One of them was his doctor, Tom Folger. They were all pointing, gesturing, and, most disturbing of all, shaking their heads.

The trouble had begun the day before. Howard had awakened with a headache, a rare occurrence unless he’d “tied one on,” which he hadn’t. In fact, he’d not had anything to drink since New Year’s Eve. After taking a dose of aspirin and eating a bit of breakfast, the pain had abated. But later that morning in the middle of a board meeting, with no warning whatsoever, he’d vomited. It had been so violent and so unexpected, with no preceding nausea, that he’d not even been able to lean aside. To his utter mortification, his undigested breakfast had spewed over the boardroom table.

With his head now freed, Howard tried to sit up, but the movement caused his headache to return in full force. He sank back to the MRI table and closed his eyes until his doctor gently touched his shoulder. Tom had been the family internist for over twenty years. He and Tom had become good friends over the years, and they knew each other well. Howard did not like what he saw in Tom’s face.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Howard asked.

“I’ve always been straight with you, Howard . . .”

“So don’t change now,” Howard whispered. He didn’t want to hear the rest, but he had to.

“It doesn’t look good,” Tom admitted. He kept his hand on Howard’s shoulder. “There are multiple tumors. Three to be exact. At least that’s how many we can see.”

“Oh, God!” Howard moaned. “It’s terminal, isn’t it?”

“That’s not the way we should talk at this point,” Tom said.

“Christ it isn’t,” Howard snapped. “You just told me you’ve always been straight with me. I asked a simple question. I have a right to know.”

“If you force me to answer, I’d have to say yes; it could be terminal. But we don’t know for sure. For the present we’ve got a lot of work to do. First thing we have to do is find out where it’s come from. Being multifocal suggests it’s spread from someplace else.”

“Then let’s get on with it,” Howard said. “If there’s a chance, I want to beat this thing.” January 4, 1:25 P.M.

When Louis Martin first awoke in the recovery room, he felt as if his throat had been scorched with an acetylene torch. He’d had sore throats before, but nothing had even come close to the pain he’d felt as he tried to swallow after his surgery. To make matters worse, his mouth had been as dry as the central Sahara.

The nurse who had materialized at his bedside seemingly out of nowhere had explained that his discomfort was due to the endotracheal tube the anesthesiologist had inserted prior to his operation. She gave him a damp washcloth to suck on and the pain had abated.

By the time he was wheeled back to his room, a different pain had started, located somewhere between his legs and radiating into the small of his back. Louis knew the cause of that discomfort. It was the site of his surgery to reduce an enlarged prostate gland. The damn thing had been forcing him to get up to urinate four or five times each night. He’d scheduled the surgery for the day after New Year’s. Traditionally that was a slow time for the computer giant he ran north of Boston.

Just as the pain was getting the best of him, another nurse gave him a bolus of Demerol through the IV which was still attached to his left hand. A bottle of fluid hung on a T-shaped pole protruding from the head of his bed.

The Demerol put him back into a drugged sleep. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he became aware of a presence next to his head. It took all his strength to open his eyes; his eyelids felt like lead. At the head of his bed was a nurse fumbling with plastic tubing coming from the IV bottle. In her right hand was a syringe.

“What’s that?” Louis mumbled. He sounded inebriated.

The nurse smiled at him.

“Sounds as if you’d had one too many,” she said.

Louis blinked as he tried to focus on the woman’s swarthy face. In his drugged state, the nurse was a blur. Yet she was correct about how he sounded.

“I don’t need any more pain medicine,” Louis managed to say. He struggled to a half-sitting position, leaning on an elbow.

“It’s not pain medicine,” the nurse said.

“Oh,” Louis said. While the nurse completed the injection, Louis slowly realized he still didn’t know what he was being given. “What kind of medicine is it?” Louis asked.

“A wonder drug,” the nurse said, quickly capping the syringe.

Louis laughed in spite of himself. He was about to ask another question, but the nurse satisfied his curiosity.