Thursday, June 25, 2009

Being buried alive was the least of my worries

It was like a twisted Bond movie. I was wrapped up tighter than a child proof medicine bottle, sitting at the bottom of a small cage that was hanging over a giant tank filled with adolescent bull sharks.

I’d made the mistake of laughing when I walked into the room, unable to contain my amusement at the campiness of the arrangement, but that had only gotten me a beating before I was bundled up and packed into the cage. Were they serious?

As it turned out, they were very serious, which they demonstrated by running an electrical current through the metal of my cage. The voltage was increased incrementally until it felt like every nerve was on fire, and I ultimately passed out.

Why was I here? What had gotten me into this situation? What had I done to warrant this treatment? I’d had the nerve to discover a cure for cancer.

I had no idea who the men who had kidnapped me worked for, no idea where I was and no idea why they wanted to keep my discovery a secret; but it all became clear in very short order.

Medicine is big business, and cancer is an enormous piece of that business. Without the need to treat, but only to vaccinate, billions of dollars of federal funding would be funneled elsewhere. That re-direction would make some people’s lives less posh than they were used to.

I’d hidden my notes and journals before heading out to talk to my mentor, Dr. Walter McAndrews at Yale, my Alma Mater. My excitement was kept almost entirely in check by a healthy amount of skepticism, but some leaked out into my voice as I relayed my tests and findings to my old professor.

The look he gave me morphed quite rapidly from disbelief to wariness to anger and finally clearly forced joy; his reaction surprised and frightened me. He had spent the majority of his career working on cancer research, soliciting more funding from the government as well as private parties than anyone else.

He had reached for his phone as he asked me to give him a moment, and his extremely out of character demeanor set off warning bells in my mind. I tried to leave to give him privacy for his call, I tried to tell him my tests weren’t conclusive and I tried to tell him I’d come back another day; he remained insistent that I stay.

His strange behavior turned me on my heel and sent me running for the door. I bolted down the hall, taking the stairs two at a time, but I only made it as far as the lobby before I felt the electric shocks of a tazer in my back seize all my muscles, including my brain and everything went black.

And now, when I opened my eyes I found I was no longer in my cage, instead I was staring up into strange faces. My instinct to run snapped my body into action, my arms and legs jolting painfully against the straps that held me to the table on which I lay.

It soon became clear what they wanted; they wanted my notes, which I wasn’t willing to give them. They tried reasoning with me, beating me and threatening to bury me alive; but being buried alive was the least of my worries when they brought my wife into the room.

She was blindfolded, gagged and her hands were tied behind her back; if I didn’t turn my notes over to them Rachel would pay the price. I stared at her, at the gun they had pressed to her head and their shouts almost completely drown out her whimpers.

A phrase I’d heard over and over throughout my life played through my mind like a mantra; the needs of the many outweigh those of the few. Over and over I reminded myself of this, and I knew that Rachel was thinking the exact same thing, but of course that knowledge wouldn’t over ride her own natural fear of dying.

My eyes went wide when Walter walked into the room, and for a split second I thought we were safe, until he took the gun from the man holding Rachel’s arm. In one smooth motion he removed her blindfold, her green gaze locking on me an instant before he shot her in the head.

I lay there stunned, unable to move or speak, barely able to breathe. My chest tightened painfully at the sight of her limp body lying in a heap on the floor, blood slowly pooling around head in an ever widening circle. Tears leaked from my unblinking eyes and as I watched Walter walk toward me I felt my expression turn smug; I would have laughed too if the bullet had given me time.

I wasn’t there when Rachel’s sister, a nurse in whom I’d confided my discovery, retrieved my notes and saw to it that they found their way into the right hands. I wasn’t there months later when the FDA approved my vaccine, or when it was first administered. I wasn’t there over the years to watch cancer become a memory.

I’d known I didn’t have to worry about being buried alive, and it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about simply being buried.

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