Something's Come Up

by Andrea Randall

  “Well, I had a two-year detour in Cornell’s medical school.”

  I sat up and assessed his face for tells that he was fucking with me. When it was plain that he was dead serious, my eyes bugged out and my lips parted.

  “You got into Cornell’s Med School.”

  He nodded as he flopped back onto the bed, a cocky smile twitching on his lips. “I did.”

  “And then...you just...left?”

  He kissed my temple and lazily pushed a lock of hair off of my cheek. “Mmm hmm.”

  I sat up. “Why? Too much of a pussy to take the sight of blood? Or were you afraid you wouldn’t look fierce in scrubs?” It made no sense. From the odd hours he kept, I figured he was a workaholic, and by the way he performed in the bedroom he was obsessively focused. Pace seemed like the last person who would just leave medical school.

  “The family business didn’t suit me the way I’d hoped.”

  “One of your parents is a doctor?” I moved up the bed so I was next to him, shimmying under the covers.

  “They both are. My dad’s in research at a massive pharmaceutical company and my mom’s an OB-GYN.”

  I cackled loudly at that. “Gynecology! How did that not suit you? Afraid you’d mix business and pleasure?”

  “Fuck off,” he teased. “OB/GYN never interested me. Medical research did, though. So for the first two years of medical school, I got to work right next to my dad during breaks and over the summer.”

  “Wow. Impressive for someone with no medical training.” I could just picture a 22-year-old Pace strutting into a research lab like he owned the place. And people believing he did.

  He shrugged. “Nepotism. Surely you have some…expertise in that area?” He grinned, obviously baiting me.

  “Point taken. So, you didn’t like the research? Too boring?”

  “The exact opposite.”

  I scrunched my forehead. He pulled his eyebrows together and sighed. I had no idea where he was going with this.

  “Okay…” he started. “Have you have ever heard of neuroblastoma?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a kind of cancer that most often shows up in children. It’s the most common extracranial cancer. Outside the head. But, it’s the most common cancer in infants.”

  My chest sank. “Like newborns?”

  He nodded, running his hand over his face. “Yes, like newborns, young babies, toddlers… Anyway, it typically starts in the adrenal glands but can—” he stopped himself, seeming to back up a little. “Adrenal glands produce adrenaline in your body, right? So they send hormones like cortisol and epinephrine, which is adrenaline, and all kinds of shit through your body. They also affect kidney function, which is really secondary here, but the point is, a problem in your adrenal glands is a big fucking problem.”

  I’d never seen Pace looking so serious or speaking so technically. He sounded like a doctor; a doctor that was about to deliver bad news.

  He shifted to face me, capturing my full intention. “Neuroblastoma has extreme heterogeneity, which means the same kind of cancer can be caused by several different factors. So, while there are ways to treat the cancer once it’s present in the body, if you don’t know the root cause of the problem, all you’re doing is treating the mess at the end.”

  “Wow,” I whispered, impressed by his unfailing intensity despite sitting nude with me in his bed.

  “Neuroblastoma is categorized as low-risk, intermediate, and high-risk, based on how active the cancer is, how clear a cause might be, etcetera. The good news is that the low-risk kind is most common in infants and can have decent recovery results.”

  I lifted my chin. “Something tells me you weren’t studying the low-risk neuroblastoma.”

  He grinned. “It’s not that it’s not important research, and anything that’s killing people from the inside is worth working on until it’s one hundred percent cured, but I was interested in the hopeless cases.”

  “Hopeless?”

  “The kids in the high-risk category who are basically given chemotherapy treatments that merely extend their life. Sometimes for a year, but most often only for a few months. And most of those months are spent in a hospital.” His tone was clinical. Clearly practiced.

  “If it’s hopeless, then why do parents bother to drag their kids through chemo and living in a hospital?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not a natural human state to accept the death of a child. And, even though I’ve seen it from the other side—what chemotherapy does to children—seeing the desperation on their parents’ faces and the vulnerability in the kids’ eyes…I get why they do it.”

  Pace closed his eyes for a long blink. I shifted uncomfortably, feeling like I should touch his shoulder or hold his hand. I didn’t want to give him the wrong impression, though.

  “Also,” he continued, “faith plays a big role. Parents start their kids on medications they know will prolong life while they get down and pray for a miracle.” His lip curled a little on the last word, causing me to sit forward.

  “So you don’t believe in miracles? What, are you atheist?” The hairs on the back of my neck instinctively began to rise.

  “No. My Southern Baptist grandmother—she thinks I’m atheist. I’m more agnostic, and even that is cause for enough strife in my family.”

  “Aren’t all doctors atheist?”

  “My dad’s not. But that’s not the point here.”

  “Then get to the point.” I lifted my eyebrow and he took an irritated breath.

  “The fact is, advances in cancer treatment are happening every day. Those religious parents aren’t misled in their hopes that something will come out while their children are undergoing chemo that could really help them in the long run.”

  I drew my knees up to my chest, wishing I had clothes on now. “So, for those high-risk kids, chemo is pretty much a Band-Aid?”

  Pace rocked his head side to side and winced a little. “It’s a lot more complicated than that, but, yeah, basically. My point in telling you all of that,” he exaggerated, “was I was invited into a small group of scientists working on a breakthrough for high-risk neuroblastoma.”

  “By your dad?”

  “Nah. At that time he was doing research on stem cell transplants for all types of cancer.” He grinned and put his hand on my thigh. His palms were sweaty, which caused me to pay close attention to his next words.

  “And?”

  “The research company was called L.G. Greene Laboratories. They’re one hundred percent privately funded, which is funding that works on a number of levels. For one, they were making incredible advances in stem cell research while the government blocked funding on it to discuss the moral implications of such research. So, even without government funds, Greene had enough money to keep up the research. Meanwhile, they were busy saving thousands of lives. Easily. Let’s talk about morals …” Pace clenched his teeth and took a deep breath.

  I made a mental note to talk to Cedric about stem cell research. I was dying to hear his thoughts on the matter. “Okay, so how did you get involved in the high-risk research?”

  “I paid attention. I’ve always been able to think clearly, and for them it’s good to have fresh eyes on research. I got a perfect score on my MCATs, my dad had earned the company millions of dollars over his career there, thanks to his research, and, most importantly, I was interested. L-6, the name of the group at Greene that was working on advances in the high-risk neuroblastoma, was on the brink of something huge. They were close to announcing a treatment that seemed to override all heterogeneity and wipe all traces of neuroblastoma from the body.”

  “A cure?” I lunged forward, gripping his shoulder.

  “Well,” he grinned, “that c-word is only really used in hypothetical discourse. You can’t go throwing it around until it’s been eradicated for a generation. But, yeah, basically. And since I was new in medical school, I was interested in looking through their old journals, which they let me do, because I
wanted to see the trial and error.”

  “Shitty to have errors when it’s people’s lives, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged and half-nodded. “But when your child is dying, and a treatment has proven not to make things worse, you’ll try anything.”

  “I still don’t see how this leads to you leaving medical school.”

  He chuckled. “I’m getting there. Stop interrupting.”

  I flashed the finger, but he kept going.

  “L-6 had developed this injectable drug that, they touted in their conclusion documents, cured high-risk neuroblastoma.”

  I put my hand up. “Wait. I thought you said they couldn’t use the word cure.”

  “That’s why I was interested.”

  “So…”

  “So I nosed around. With proper clearance, of course. The active drug has a complicated, ridiculous name that in the lab the abbreviated to Trivoxin. In paper after paper, the addition of Trivoxin to intravenous medications proved nearly fatal to lab mice. When they changed course, injecting the medication right into the adrenal glands once a day for thirty days, at the end of seven days there was no sign of cancer left in the body. They divided the mice up after that, some receiving no continuing injections, and the others at various intervals.”

  “How many continued injections were needed?”

  “According to the papers? None.”

  “None?”’

  “None. For weeks I lost myself in the research library, baffled and excited by this research. In the meantime, Greene was starting their small clinical trials.”

  “They didn’t need, like, FDA approval, or whatever?”

  “You need FDA approval before a drug is allowed on the open market. The FDA will often come and assist research companies in clinical trials that people can volunteer for. But most private companies will do their own small scale trials before involving the FDA, since it’s such a fucking process and you have to make sure all of your political ducks are in a row to ensure they’ll even allow the test.”

  “So what happened?”

  He looked me straight in the eyes and I couldn’t have looked away if I wanted to. “The drug worked.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope. The youngest child in the study was a three month old with high-risk neuroblastoma. He’s five now, and has had clean cancer screens every three months since his last injection of Trivoxin. The oldest in that particular trial was a five year old who had the same outcome. Five years, clean screens. Cancer survival rates stop being recorded after five years. When they reach that milestone, they’ve survived.”

  I swallowed hard. “Why isn’t this taking up every news story on the fucking planet?” My stomach churned at the question.

  Pace closed his eyes again, and took another deep breath. “After the small clinical trials seemed to be working, Greene began the FDA process. The FDA researchers came in and looked at the studies, the research, the paperwork, the drugs—all of it. The next day when I came in, the L-6 group was disbanded and the Trivoxin studies were all canceled. Done.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “There was a group of twenty kids—ten infants and ten kids over the age of one—right in the middle of their treatment cycle when the FDA shut down the study.”

  My breath was more ragged than when we’d used the crop. “Why? What the fuck? Were there…like…toxicity issues or something?” I didn’t even know if toxicity was an appropriate term to use in this instance, but it felt right.

  Pace remained silent, looking down the length of his legs and off into the distance.

  “Pace,” I nudged him, “why did they shut down the study?”

  He covered his mouth for second, rage and sorrow creeping into his eyes. “Because,” he sighed, “sick kids turn more of a profit than healthy kids do.”

  “Wha—” I cut myself off, allowing time for his words to sink into my brain. “Y-you’re saying the FDA knew this was a cure and shut it down at the interest of the health care industry?”

  “Sort of. What I’m saying is one of the researchers sent to approve the clinical trial…that would lead to FDA approval, has a lot of money…like close to a billion dollars…invested in a competing research laboratory.” His tone was stormy. Resolved.

  “Is that even legal? For people to be in government agencies when they have ties to corporations like that, I mean?”

  Pace laughed. “Oral sex is illegal in Indiana, but I’ve been with some girls from Purdue who could—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Get to the point.” I waved him on, uninterested in tales from the sexual crypt.

  Although the timing was inappropriate, his authority was turning me on.

  “Why didn’t Greene go to the media? Or parents, for that matter?” I raged. “A story like this is the only matchstick the media would need to blow the FDA and Greene wide the fuck open.”

  Pace shook his head. “The lab was paid off. Hush money exists, you know. But, more crippling was that they were threatened with miles of red tape for all of their other research if they allowed this one to continue. This wasn’t the FDA as an entity, mind you. It was this one researcher, and whoever she was connected with.”

  “She?”

  Pace chuckled dryly. “I know, just when you needed another reason to hate rich white dudes, I go change it up on you.”

  “Hey,” I grinned, “I didn’t mention the skin color.”

  “Oh, so you thought it was a rich black guy?” He playfully slapped my thigh.

  “Fuck off! What about the families? They just had to go home? No more medicine? Why didn’t someone just bring the injections to their home?”

  “The researcher who did whatever it was she did to stop the trial planted people at Greene that day and they’ve never left. All the Trivoxin was destroyed, they said, and they were guarded against making more.”

  “What do you mean, they said?”

  “Do you think anyone would blindly destroy a cancer cure? Especially one for children? Greene didn’t destroy it, and no one else has it.”

  “So they’re just sitting on it?”

  He looked frustrated. “They can’t continue to spend billions of dollars producing a drug that won’t make it to the market. They can’t sell it to the families because it’s too expensive without FDA approval. They can’t just give it to them because then the company would go bankrupt.”

  “So…you’re suing the FDA?”

  He laughed. “Fuck no. I’d get further trying to pass for a short white guy. I’m going after the researcher and anyone associated with her.”

  My mouth hung open. “What’d your dad say?”

  “‘Keep your nose clean, son, and keep doing the good you know you can do.’ So I left. I left Greene and I left medical school.”

  I slid off the bed and got one of Pace’s button down shirts. “Won’t they just try to shut you up?”

  “They don’t know I exist. A second-year med student has no business in a project like that. My name wasn’t on anything and I was made scarce in the offices in the basement when the FDA descended. I have no gag order.”

  “Why not just make a lot of noise now?”

  Pace stood and pulled a t-shirt over his head. “Because. I intend to win. Not to just expose the FDA’s lack of background checking in its researchers, but, more importantly, to get Trivoxin in the hands of those who need it.”

  “What happened to the kids in the halted study?”

  He closed his eyes as he spoke. “Seven are dead, the other thirteen are in various stages of decline, but all lived longer than they would have without the medication. All twenty of them were high-risk.”

  Goosebumps covered my skin. “Who knows about your plans?”

  “No one. I convinced my parents, and even my brother, that medical school was exhausting and not lucrative. My parents are less concerned with my motives now that Adrian is considering law school, too. I need to get a degree, get money, and storm the Supreme Court. It’s going
to take some tactical preparation, Red.”

  I paused for a long moment while I figured out how to phrase my next question. After I came up with no smooth was to finesse my vocabulary, I abandoned the attempt. “Why the fuck are you telling me this?”

  “I trust you.”

  I literally took a step back. The weight of the last half hour crushed me as I collected my clothes. “I don’t need your trust.”

  “Where the hell are you going?” He sounded like a parent, or a pissed off husband.

  “I need air.”

  Pace raced around the bed and grabbed my shoulders. “Steph. Breathe. It’s okay.”

  I held out my hands. “You’re not even going to tell me not to tell anyone?”

  “That’s…kind of what trust is…isn’t it?”

  “I really wouldn’t know. I—”

  “Look,” he cut me off,” I don’t trust easily. No one’s ever hurt me or anything dramatic like that, I just have high expectations. You meet every single one.”

  Needing a break from the heavy, I smirked. “So what? You’re going to be like Erin Brockovich or something?”

  He stepped back and I followed because he was pulling my shirt, slowly unbuttoning it as he spoke. “Nope,” he said with his trademark broad grin, “I’m going to be like Pace Turner and save a shitload of lives.”

  “You could have done that by being a doctor, you know.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not the same. There are many more lives at stake here than I could have hoped to affect if I slaved in a surgical ward for thirty years.”

  I followed him straight to the bed, turned on by the authority Pace carried himself with. It was there from the first day, and wasn’t just a show.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” I whispered in between kisses.

  He moaned into my neck. “I know.”

  Pace, July 2012

  Less than twenty minutes after our unscheduled stop, I pulled the car into the parking lot of Finnegan’s.

  “Well,” Steph’s eyebrows lifted comically, “let’s collect the lush, shall we?”

  “Be nice,” I warned sarcastically.

  She flashed me the finger and reached for her door handle. She paused, then crossed her arms, sitting back and waiting for me to open the door for her.