Terminal

For a second Sean toyed with the idea of talking with Mark about Hiroshi’s behavior, but decided against it. He had to speak to someone in authority. There wasn’t anything Mark would be able to do.

Frustrated that he could get no satisfaction for his anger, Sean started back toward his lab. He was almost to the stairwell door when he thought of another question for Mark.

Returning to his tiny office, Sean asked the tech if the pathologists over in the hospital cooperated with the research staff.

“On occasion,” Mark said. “Dr. Barton Friedburg has coauthored a number of research papers that require a pathologic interpretation.”

“What kind of guy is he?” Sean asked. “Friendly or unfriendly? Seems to me that people fall into one camp or the other around here.”

“Definitely friendly,” Mark said. “Besides, I think you might be confusing unfriendly with being serious and preoccupied.”

“You think I could call him up and ask him a few questions?” Sean asked. “Is he that friendly?”

“Absolutely,” Mark said.

Sean went down to his lab, and using the phone in the glass-enclosed office so he could sit at a desk, he phoned Dr. Friedburg. He took it as an auspicious sign when the pathologist came on the line directly.

Sean explained who he was and that he was interested in the findings of a biopsy done the day before on Helen Cabot.

“Hold the line,” Dr. Friedburg said. Sean could hear him talking with someone else in the lab. “We didn’t get any biopsy from a Helen Cabot,” he said, coming back.

“But I know she had it done yesterday,” Sean said.

“It went south to Basic Diagnostics,” Dr. Friedburg said. “You’ll have to call there if you want any information on it. That sort of thing doesn’t come through this lab at all.”

“Who should I ask for?” Sean asked.

“Dr. Levy,” Dr. Friedburg said. “Ever since Paul and Roger left, she’s been running the show down there. I don’t know who she has reading the specimens now, but it’s not us.”

Sean hung up the phone. Nothing about Forbes seemed to be easy. He certainly wasn’t about to ask Dr. Levy about Helen Cabot. She’d know what he was up to in a flash, especially after she heard from Ms. Richmond about his looking at Helen’s chart.

Sean sighed as he looked down at the work he was doing trying to grow crystals with the Forbes protein. He felt like throwing it all into the sink.

FOR JANET, the afternoon seemed to pass quickly. With patients coming and going for therapy and diagnostic tests, there was the constant tactical problem of organizing it all. In addition, there were complicated treatment protocols that required precise timing and dosage. But during this feverish activity Janet was able to observe the way patients were divided among the staff. Without much finagling she was able to arrange to be the nurse assigned to take care of Helen Cabot, Louis Martin, and Kathleen Sharenburg the following day.

Although she didn’t handle them herself, she did get to see the containers the coded drugs came in when the nurses in charge of the medulloblastoma patients for the day got the vials from Marjorie. Once they’d received them, the nurses took them into the pharmacy closet to load the respective syringes. The MB300 drug was in a 10cc injectable bottle while the MB303 was in a smaller 5cc bottle. There was nothing special about these containers. They were the same containers many other injectable drugs were packaged in.

It was customary for everyone to have a mid-afternoon as well as a mid-morning break. Janet used hers to go back down to medical records. Once there she used the same ploy she’d used with Tim. She told one of the librarians, a young woman by the name of Melanie Brock, that she was new on the staff and that she was interested in learning the Forbes system. She said she was familiar with computers, but she could use some help. The librarian was impressed with Janet’s interest and was more than happy to show her their filing format, using the medical records’ access code.

Left on her own after Melanie’s introduction, Janet called up all patients with the T-9872 designator which she’d used to pull up current medulloblastoma cases on the ward’s work station. This time, Janet got a different list. Here there were thirty-eight cases on record over the last ten years. This list did not include the five cases currently in the hospital.

Sensing a recent increase, Janet asked the computer to graph the number of cases against the years. In a graph form, the results were rather striking.

LOOKING AT the graph, Janet noted that over the first eight years there had been five medulloblastoma cases, whereas during the last two years there had been thirty-three. She found the increase curious until she remembered that it had been in the last two years that the Forbes had had such success with its treatment. Success sparked referrals. Surely that accounted for the influx.