Read Blood Test for Free Online

planned to keep him there for the first course of chemo,
and then check how the immune system was working. It looked open and shut and
then I got a call from Augie Valcroix, my clinical Fellow—I’ll get to him in a
minute—and he told me the parents were having cold feet.”
    “No indication of problems when you first spoke to
them?”
    “Not really, Alex. The father does all the talking in
this family. She sat there and wept, I did my best to comfort her. He asked
lots of picky questions—like I said, he was trying to impress—but it was all
very friendly. They seemed like intelligent people, not flaky.”
    He shook his head in frustration.
    “After Valcroix’s call I went right over, talked to
them, thinking it was momentary anxiety—you know sometimes parents hear about
treatment and get the idea we’re out to torture their child. They start looking
for something simple, like apricot pits. If the doctor takes the time to
explain the value of chemo, they usually return to the fold. But not the
Swopes. They had their minds made up.
    “I used a chalkboard. Drew out the survival graphs—that
eighty-one percent stat I gave you was for localized disease. Once the tumors
spread the figure drops to forty-six. It didn’t impress them. I told them speed
was of the essence. I laid on the charm, cajoled, pleaded, shouted. They didn’t
argue. Simply refused. They want to take him home.”
    He tore a roll to shreds and arranged the fragments in
a semicircle on his plate.
    “I’m going to have eggs,” he announced.
    He beckoned the waitress back. She took the order and
gave me a look behind his back that said I’m used to this.
    “Any theory as to what caused the turnaround?” I
asked.
    “I have two. One, Augie Valcroix mucked it up. Two,
those damned Touchers poisoned the parents’ minds.”
    “Who?”
    “Touchers. That’s what I call them. Members of some damned sect that has its headquarters
near where the family lives. They worship this guru named Noble Matthias—that’s
what the social worker told me—and call themselves the Touch.” Raoul’s voice
filled with contempt. “Madre de Dios , Alex, California has become a
sanctuary for the psychic refuse of the world!”
    “Are they holistic types?”
    “The social worker says yes—big surprise, no?
Assholistic is more like it. Cure disease with carrots and bran and
foul-smelling herbs thrown over the shoulder at midnight. The culmination of
centuries of scientific progress— voluntary cultural regression!”
    “What did these Touch people do, exactly?”
    “Nothing I can prove. But all I know is things were
going smoothly, the consents were signed, then two of them—a man and a woman—visited
the parents and disaster!”
    A plate heaped with scrambled eggs arrived along with
a dish of yellow sauce. I remembered his affection for hollandaise. He poured
the sauce on the eggs and used his fork to divide the mound into three
sections. The middle segment was consumed first, followed by the one on his
right, and finally the left third disappeared. More dabbing, more imaginary
crumb disposal.
    “What does your Fellow have to do with it?”
    “Valcroix? Probably plenty. Let me tell you about this
character. On paper he looked great—M.D. from McGill—he’s a French-Canadian—internship
and residency at Mayo, a year of research at Michigan. He’s close to forty,
older than most applicants, so I thought he’d be mature. Ha! When I interviewed
him I talked to a well-groomed, intelligent man. What showed up six months
later was an aging flower child.
    “The man is bright but he’s unprofessional. He talks
and dresses like an adolescent, tries to get down to the patients’ level. The
parents can’t relate to him and eventually the kids see through it, too. There
are other problems, as well. He’s slept with at least one mother of a patient
that I know about and I suspect there’ve been several others. I chewed him out
and he looked at me as if I