CONDITION – Book One: A Medical Miracle

by Alec Birri

  ‘Exactly! You should be proud of that kind of loyalty. You can’t have a society where it’s one rule for some and another for others.’

  Lucy calmed. ‘That’s right. Strange how you never saw the union bosses begging for food, though.’

  Tony mellowed a little. ‘I’m just saying, your dad played a proud and prominent part in the union movement in those days, but it’s strange how he only remembers being a worker now – nothing else.’

  ‘Tony, he had Alzheimer’s. Up until six months ago he’d forgotten his entire life, let alone a period of history the rest of us just want to forget anyway. He remembers his family and that’s the most important thing.’ Lucy became sad again. ‘You do know he just wants to be with Mum now, don’t you?’

  Tony nodded and looked out of the window. Their Ford Focus occupied the space where he’d parked the E-type previously.

  The designer of that car built it to be the best there is and yet there’s always someone who wants it to be better. Imagine if we treated people the same way.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Tracy threw her arms around Adams and burst into tears. He waited for a reply to his question which she began to give but then stopped, let go, and took out a handkerchief to recover. She wagged a finger at him.

  ‘Oh no. You’re not getting away with it that easily. I want the full works – romantic meal for two, bended knee and everything. Asking me to marry you in the ward office is about as unromantic as it gets.’ She regarded his empty hands with disdain before putting hers on her hips. ‘You haven’t even got a ring.’

  ‘I thought we’d choose one together.’

  ‘You’re supposed to get it anyway and I decide whether to take it back or not.’

  He gave her a look. ‘What was that about romance?’

  Tracy playfully slapped his shoulder and they embraced again. She ran her fingers through his hair, slowing her movements as she did so – he appeared to be undergoing another one of her special physical examinations.

  ‘What are you looking for this time?’

  ‘Just checking it was you who asked the question.’

  Adams laughed. ‘And did you find any evidence of the professor’s handiwork?’

  ‘No, but I’d still like to know what’s finally brought you to your senses.’

  ‘Well, I considered what you said about me being the wrong side of forty and you—’

  She put a hand over his mouth. ‘Do you want to try that again?’

  He nodded and she let him speak. He took her hand. ‘I love you and don’t ever want to lose you.’

  The nurse half-closed her eyes and wallowed for a moment in the perfect romance of the words – before snapping back to reality and planting a quick peck on his cheek. ‘Good boy.’

  Adams grimaced – the highly qualified medical professional appeared to have become some kind of pet.

  The love of her life finally seeing sense, Tracy moved straight to planning the next stage of their life together. She tousled his greying hair again. ‘You’re right about your age. We’d better start a family while you’re still up to it.’

  ‘What are you talking about? There are decades of healthy sperm production left in me – men can father children well into their nineties.’

  ‘Well, if you’re going to be anything like the nonagenarians in here, count me out having sex with you.’ Tracy tried to ignore the picture that conjured up in her mind. ‘Mind you, thanks to Professor Savage, we’re all going to end up living forever anyway.’

  Adams considered that. ‘He’d have to get around the laws of diminishing returns first. Fixing one problem in geriatrics just seems to cause or highlight another. Take Brian Passen, for instance. We finally manage to crack his dementia, only for angina to finish him off. It’s a bit like an old car – no matter how good the maintenance, sooner or later it’s going to have to be replaced with a newer model.’

  Tracy pondered the patients’ ages. ‘Don’t you think it’s strange the professor chose such elderly subjects for the trial?’

  Adams narrowed his gaze at her. ‘It’s Alzheimer’s, Tracy. The disease and old age tend to come hand in hand.’

  She continued to make her point. ‘Yes, but there are plenty of people in their fifties and sixties living with the early onset of it, so why not choose from them instead? Their secondary conditions are bound to be far less life-threatening. It’s almost as if he needed them to be as old as possible. You said yourself you didn’t understand why such physically weak candidates were selected.’ She put her two and two together. ‘We’ve already lost one patient. Maybe he wants them all to die?’

  Adams scoffed at the unethical implication of her suggestion, but Tracy stood firm.

  ‘Okay, Mister Know-it-all. You explain it.’

  He had to admit he couldn’t. Tracy walked over to a filing cabinet and pulled open a drawer. She took a folder from it.

  ‘I wonder if there’s anything that links them, apart from dementia and extreme old age?’

  She opened Alice’s file and started reading it. Adams walked over to the desk and switched on the computer. ‘You won’t find much in those folders. Just original signatures, like the lasting powers of attorney. We can have a look at their online records if you like, but as we’ve written most of them, we already know what we’ll find.’

  He waited for the PC to boot up while his fiancée withdrew another folder, followed by two more. She compared them.

  ‘What does “AHRL” mean?’

  Adams shrugged.

  ‘Most of the lawyers that drew up these powers of attorney have “Member of the AHRL” under their titles.’

  The computer woke up and the doctor googled the acronym. ‘Association of Human Rights Lawyers.’

  They looked at each other. Tracy spoke.

  ‘Why choose a human rights lawyer to draw up a basic legal document?’ She pointed at the computer. ‘Type “Alice Mansley human rights” and see what comes up.’

  Adams read what appeared and grinned. ‘Guess what? Our eldest centenarian was famous. “Dame arrested at Dounreay Power Station.”’ He clicked on the next result. ‘“Actress vows to fight on with Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.”’ What the doctor saw under the third entry impressed him even more. ‘Emmeline Pankhurst was her grandmother!’

  ‘Really? You’d never have guessed from the way she talks – positively racist now.’ Tracy felt she was on to something. ‘Search “Brian Passen human rights”.’

  Adams wasn’t quite so enamoured this time. ‘“Company blames militant shop steward for factory closure.”’ The next reference to Brian appeared to surprise him. ‘“Union champions Passen as new Marx.”’ He looked up. ‘I’d never have put Brian down as a communist.’

  His future wife furrowed her brow. ‘That’s because we didn’t know what he was like before he got Alzheimer’s. Try “Gary Jacob human rights”.’

  The doctor seemed worried by what he found this time. ‘“Gangland thug jailed for life with no prospect of parole.”’ He checked some of the images with the result to make sure the news item detailed the exact same one-hundred and five-year-old Gary Jacob now residing in his ward. It unfortunately did. ‘Drugs, prostitution, rape – you name it. So much for no parole – looks like those human rights lawyers managed to get him out.’ A look of surprise appeared on his face. ‘He’s a murderer! I’m glad he seems to have changed his ways.’

  Tracy pondered how stark the difference in him was. She selected another folder. ‘Brian said Derek Bullingham assaulted him with his walking stick yesterday. I took Derek’s side at the time because he was the most stressed about it, but he’s always been a troublemaker.’ She connected the dots from the search results and how the patients appeared now. ‘I wonder if he was a diplomat or something like that before he got Alzheimer’s?
’

  Adams placed his fingers on the keyboard, but then stopped. He sat back. ‘It’s the medication, Tracy. We both know how the red pill works. A dramatic change in personality is just another temporary side-effect that will eventually settle – no different to the thoughts of suicide. Well done for spotting it, though.’

  Tracy thought he couldn’t have been more patronising if he tried. ‘So you knew about this?’

  ‘No, I didn’t, but wanting to commit suicide is just a bit more obvious than not wanting to rape and murder anymore, don’t you think? Alzheimer’s can cause some pretty extreme character changes, so think what the treatment has to do to combat that.’

  His eyes settled on the computer’s screen again. ‘I wasn’t aware of their pre-dementia conditions, though, and I must admit it does seem strange how different they are now.’ He typed “Derek Bullingham human rights” into the address bar. He wasn’t quite the B-list celebrity of the others, so it took a while to find him. The doctor chuckled when he did. ‘You were nearly right.’ He turned the screen so Tracy could see the image. It was of a priest.

  She studied it. ‘I can see the logic of the treatment turning the son of the Devil into an angel, but the other way around? That’s a bit dangerous, isn’t it? What if Derek tries to kill someone?’

  Adams widened his eyes at her. ‘Then he’ll drop dead from the effort and justice will have been done.’

  They stared at each other as an answer to Tracy’s original question began to emerge. She offered what she was thinking.

  ‘I wonder what Derek would be physically capable of now if he’d been a fifty-year-old early-onset dementia sufferer with no secondary conditions?’

  The nurse counted the remaining folders. ‘Including the poor man we’ve lost, there were originally fifteen patients. Let’s see how many other saints have turned sinners and vice versa.’

  The doctor sat back from the PC again. ‘Aren’t we making certain assumptions?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘That we’re going to find them, for a start – they can’t all have done something significant enough to be on the web.’

  ‘Do as you’re told!’

  Adams sighed and entered the next name she gave him. He raised an eyebrow at how quickly he found his history, but took on a more serious air when the search results of the remaining ten patients appeared just as swiftly.

  ‘Looks like we’ve found your link, Tracy – they’ve all done something worthy of a Wikipedia entry.’ He mused on the significance of that. ‘The professor must have wanted to compare their progress with their former selves. It makes sense, as none of them would have been able to recall it when they first arrived, and next of kin would only have known so much.’ He looked up from the screen. ‘A patient with either a famous or infamous background would be ideal in that regard.’ He furrowed his brow. ‘But why are we only finding this out now?’

  Tracy finished writing. ‘I make that eleven saints against four sinners.’

  ‘But only three of them have criminal records?’

  ‘One was a Tory MP.’

  The doctor cocked his head to one side. ‘I don’t think being in the nasty party counts.’

  She put her tongue in her cheek before sealing the patient’s condemnation. ‘And a man.’

  Her beau jumped up and chased her around the office. He caught and tickled her just as the door opened.

  Mike, the male nurse, looked at them both. Tracy glanced at her watch.

  ‘Ooh – I’m late for my shift.’

  She pushed Adams away and made for the exit. The two nurses grinned at each other and exchanged thumbs up as they left, gossiping.

  ‘I guess our new social status is official after all.’

  Adams looked at the notes Tracy had made and the two columns marked “Saints” and “Sinners” next to them. He chuckled at how readily she’d put the ex-Conservative Member of Parliament with the criminals, while the one ex-Labour MP they had on the clinical trial was apparently a good guy. No need to guess which way my wife intends voting at the next general election then, he thought to himself. He went to screw the page up when something else she’d written caught his eye. It was the words “Now a Nazi?” next to Alice’s name.

  Tracy had made a note of something she thought relevant next to most of the patients, and it caused the doctor to sit back down at the computer. He searched for Gary Jacob again and wrote down what he was hoping he wouldn’t find. He did the same with the other two ex-cons on his ward. He sat back and pondered the meaning of what he’d discovered. ‘Surely not?’

  Adams turned to Tracy’s saints and did the same. He ended up with a list of the patients’ past allegiances and affiliations, which he wrote down in a distinct order – not in a list from top to bottom – but from left to right. It began with Alice’s membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and finished with Gary’s association with the National Front.

  Adams picked up what he’d written and stared at it in disbelief. Starting with the pacifists and communists on the left and finishing with the nationalists and fascists on the right, each patient appeared to represent a perfect example of a certain political or religious view. Or, rather, did. It wasn’t just their personalities and characters that were different now – so were their individual social and theological beliefs. They were the opposite.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘Just so we can be absolutely clear, Sir John, the cure for Alzheimer’s is one hundred per cent effective, but does still carry a small risk of suicide?’

  Professor Savage looked away from Lady Amali and towards Alex Salib and Father Francis sitting in the public gallery. The distance between the two neither confirmed nor denied any collusion, although if they did have a hand in instigating this latest challenge to his work, it would have been for very different reasons. He studied the rest of the medical board to try and gauge his level of support, and then at the press gallery to speculate on what tomorrow’s newspapers would have to say on the matter. He had hoped to make the results of the trial public at a time of his choosing, but that was impossible now. He answered the chairperson’s question.

  ‘The suicide side-effect has two distinct phases, Lady Amali. The first occurs a few weeks after surgery and around the time the new cells have become a physical part of the recipient’s brain. The donor’s own consciousness is then free to engage with the patient’s, which, as you can imagine, can be somewhat troubling. Particularly with a dementia sufferer who hasn’t been able to exercise their own consciousness for years, let alone have to accept someone else’s. Under those circumstances, psychosis is all but inevitable, with hallucinations and extreme paranoia sadly leading to a desperation to want to end it all as soon as possible.’

  Lady Amali looked down at what had been placed in front of her. ‘On that point, Sir John, I see there have been a number of incidents during the clinical trial, some of which resulted in significant injury to the patients involved.’

  She read out the report of Brian’s accident with the barbecue. The professor concurred.

  ‘We can’t be absolutely certain, as no one witnessed him deliberately forcing his arm into the flames, but it does tie in with his suicidal thoughts at the time. The incident was recorded as being caused by the psychosis.’

  Lady Amali nodded, as did some of the other board members. She motioned for Savage to continue.

  ‘Fortunately, the medication has proven to be highly effective in combating these visions and fears, to the extent that every patient has now made a full recovery from their dementia.’ He readied himself for the questions his next statement would generate. ‘However, that success means all the patients are now able to understand the reality of their situation and that has led to a new phase of some considering rational suicide.’

  The board members looked at each other and mu
rmuring began amongst the public and press. Lady Amali banged her gavel.

  ‘Sir John, are you saying the cure results in many of the patients still wanting to end their lives?’

  The professor scanned the troubled faces of his supporters. ‘First of all, I want to make it clear the treatment is not a cure. The new tissue acts as a surrogate in replacing the damaged cells – it doesn’t terminate the disease which continues to exist. The introduced brain matter will suffer the exact same fate eventually, but hopefully not for many years. Secondly, although the procedure fully recovers a person’s core competencies like physical movement, reasoning, judgement, and concentration, memory has been less successful. Only the ability to recognise family and a limited number of events from the past has had a positive outcome. Normal short and long-term memory only seem to begin functioning correctly again from mid-trial onwards. In essence, the further back in the past they look, the more they’re able to recall, but much of it will have been permanently erased by the disease. I’m afraid in some cases that can mean decades of knowledge lost.’

  Savage addressed the public and press. ‘Imagine waking up one day totally conscious of the fact that you can no longer remember the last fifty years of your life – how do you think that would make you feel?’

  The murmuring turned to louder chatter and he noticed the odd notes the press had been making became fevered. The gavel was banged again.

  ‘Sir John, this isn’t a presentation – it’s an investigation – and I’d appreciate it if you would confine your comments to the board.’

  Savage turned back and feigned a look of mea culpa. A fellow neurologist leaned across to whisper something in the chair’s ear and she let him speak.

  ‘Sir John, the trial has clearly produced some significant questions about your procedure. Why do you think the board should sanction your method for all dementia sufferers?’ The professor noted more than a hint of professional jealousy in the voice.