'The man's got a ton of lawyers, I'm sure. But I doubt any of them are M.D.'s. Men like Grayson want the best. I've just got to find a way of educating him as to who, in this type of legal business, the best is. You take care now.'
Without waiting for Truscott to leave, he hurried back into his office.
TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT
by Axel Devlin
July 6
Dateline: Crunchy Granola General, a.k.a. the Medical Center of Boston (MCB). At a news conference attended by just about everybody in the city with a microphone, Glenn Paris, a.k.a. California Dreamin', let the public in on the latest tribulation to befall his once-august institution of healing. It seems MCB obstetrics patients, THREE OF THEM that we know of, have developed a horrible bleeding disorder called DIC. One of those poor souls lost her arm. The other two lost their lives. And all three of their unborn children died before they could be birthed. FIVE DEAD; ONE MAIMED. This is serious stuff, my friends. Serious and terrifying as hell.
Always image conscious, Paris yesterday staged a smooth and appealing show, the purpose of which was to assuage public concern over this sudden lethal epidemic. M.D.'s gave medical explanations. Paris promised an immediate investigation by the epidemiology section of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. And last but far from least, herbalist, acupuncturist, and obstetrician Sarah Baldwin, M.D., explained how she had leapt into the breech with her trusty acupuncture needles to save the life of the latest DIC victim.
Well, it turns out that there was one fact that neither Dr. Baldwin nor Mr. Paris chose to share with the public-one potentially crucial thing that all three afflicted women had in common. They had all taken a special HERBAL PRENATAL SUPPLEMENT concocted by Dr. Baldwin herself. It's made up of nine different herbs and roots with names like elephant sleeper and moondragon. The good doctor recommends it to all her clinic patients in place of tried and true (and FDA controlled) prenatal vitamins. Now two of those HERBAL PRENATAL SUPPLEMENT patients are dead and a third is maimed. Coincidence???
Well, I ran all this past a pharmacist friend of mine. We are still trying to wipe the astonished look off his face. He now has the list of the roots and herbs in Dr. Baldwin's potion and has promised to do some research for us all. Meanwhile, even he will not be able to answer such questions as: Where do these herbs and roots come from? Who checks them for contamination? Who checks them for composition?
Incredible, isn't it, what can happen when a health institution is allowed to slip farther and farther out of the mainstream of accepted medical care. Well, stay tuned… And don't say the old Axeman didn't warn you.
CHAPTER 13
July 6
Sarah stood in the operating room beneath an icy, blue-white light. She was delivering an infant by cesarean section before a gallery of observers that included, it seemed, every person with whom she had had any contact over the eventful week just past.
'Too bad, your baby's dead,' she said to the patient, whose face was covered with a sheet. She turned to the gallery and bowed. 'Too bad, everyone, her baby's dead. Too bad.'
Glenn Paris smiled down at her approvingly, as did Randall Snyder and Annalee Ettinger. Alma Young, in uniform, applauded and blew her kisses. Several reporters from the press conference gave her A-okay signs. Others photographed her. Then, with a flourish, she whisked the sheet aside only to see herself. Her eyes were bloody hollows; her mouth was agape in a silent scream of death.
Sarah awoke shrieking, bathed in a chilling sweat. It was four-thirty in the morning.
Trembling, she pushed herself out of bed and pulled on her robe. Then she put on some tea and drew a hot bath. She was terrified, she knew, not only by the disturbing content of her dream, but by the fact that she had experienced it at all. For much of her early life, she had been a slave to all manner of nightmares. The most consistent scenario, often recurring as many as two or three times a week, revolved around her being bound, gagged, and totally helpless. From there, on any given night, she would be stabbed repeatedly, beaten, smothered, thrown from a great height, or hurled into the sea. Never in the horrible dreams did she actually see the face of her assailant. On rare occasions, the man-she never doubted it was a man-would burn her with cigarettes. At times the vivid nightmares so haunted her, so dominated her life, that she would simply refuse to go to sleep.
In her mid-teens, at the suggestion of a concerned teacher, she began seeing a psychologist. It seemed obvious to the woman that some event in Sarah's past-isolated or recurrent-was at the core of her terror. The therapist did what she could to get at that source. But Sarah's mother, already drifting deeper and deeper into her dementia, could supply little useful information.
The psychologist then sent Sarah for a number of sessions of hypnosis, and once even took a day off to drive her to Syracuse for a consultation at the university medical center. Nothing helped. Sarah simply could not connect with any event in her childhood that could have sparked such bizarre and debilitating fantasies.
During college, the disturbing dreams seemed to come less frequently, but they were no less terrifying. She tried another course of psychotherapy and hypnosis, and even consented to take some sort of pill designed, her physician said, to alter the neurologic pattern of her sleep. What the drug altered instead was her grade point average, which dropped that semester from a 3.8 to a 2.9.
Eventually peace did come for her. The answer lay in the simple mountain people whom she had traveled halfway around the world to help. In a village in the foothills of Luang Chiang Dao, just a few miles from the Burmese border, Dr. Louis Han, placed her in the hands of a healer-a wizened, stoop-shouldered man, who was, Han said, over 110 years old.
The healer, speaking a dialect of Mandarin that Sarah could not understand, communicated with her through Han. Whether her nightmares were grounded in a past event, or perhaps even a future event, was of no consequence, he said. What mattered was that at the time of sleep, she was not at ease. The spirit that guided her throughout each day remained locked within her. The devastating dreams were nothing more than that day spirit, expressing anger at being detained and demanding a clean separation from her so that it, too, might rest and renew.
All Sarah need do to end the nightmares, the old man promised, was to spend some quiet, contemplative time at the end of each day, first embracing her guiding spirit and then releasing it.
Not even Louis Han knew the exact nature of the tea the healer brewed for her that night. But Sarah drank it willingly and soon drifted off to sleep. When she awoke, two days later, she knew the day spirit within her, an elegant, pure white swan.
Each night from then on, she meditated before going to bed, often actually seeing her swan take flight. Her days, even the most trying ones, began ending peacefully. And the vivid nightmares that had defied her and so many physicians had never recurred-not until tonight.
The hot water supply in Sarah's building, which later in the morning would be inadequate even for a decent shower, was plentiful at such an early hour. Sarah kept the tub filled with a slow, hot stream until she trusted her shivering was gone for good. Things happen for a reason, she reminded herself. The belief was one of the pillars on which she had built her life. Things happen to teach us or to send us off in other, more important directions. By the time she toweled off and slipped into her robe, the message in her nightmare-two of them, actually-seemed quite clear.
Understandably, but quite unacceptably, she had begun allowing the demands of work to override her life. Her periods of meditation and reflection had grown brief and generally ineffectual. The connection with her spiritual self was all but gone. She was paying less and less attention to Sarah, trusting more and more that her work on behalf of others was enough to provide her with the strength to deal with each day. The nightmare was telling her otherwise.
It was telling her something else as well: She had made more than enough appearances on center stage.
