“Who is he and what’s he got?” I had just finished dessert and was deciding if I wanted more. No. I was good.
“Jim Barnes and it’s not for him. His daughter, Jennifer, is the one that needs your help. She’s thirty-two. A few years ago she got breast cancer and managed to catch it early enough that she was able to fight it off with surgery and chemotherapy. She was all set to get married in six months when it came back. This time, she wasn’t so lucky. It spread around her body so fast that surgery wasn’t a viable option anymore. She’s not responding well to the chemotherapy this time and the other drugs that she’s tried don’t seem to be slowing the cancer growth sufficiently. Last week she put a stop to more treatments. As much as she can, she wants to enjoy the remaining time she has left.”
“How long did the doctors give her?”
“A month, maybe two. That was last week.”
“How did you find out about all this?”
“Jim and I have crossed paths a few times over the years at conventions and we have some mutual friends. He’s mostly in oil out in Texas. He’s getting on in years and was planning to hand off the company to Jennifer over the next several years. Same as I’m doing with Mark. Jennifer is his only heir apparent and with her time coming up, Jim was looking to see if anyone was interested in making an offer on his company. He knows that oil isn’t my expertise, but he called anyways in the hope that I’d know someone who is. We got to talking and I told him that I might have a better option for Jennifer.”
“What did you tell him exactly?” I really hoped that Jake didn’t oversell me. I preferred to under promise and over deliver.
“Just that I knew someone with an experimental drug and that based on what I knew of it there was a chance it could help. I explained that there was no charge if it didn’t work, but if it did, then you were charging twenty million dollars. All he asked me is when could he bring her over. I told him Monday morning at nine would be fine. I took the liberty of giving him the address to Hannah’s Home.”
Mark and Harry’s eyes had bugged out when they’d heard the price that Jake had quoted. Harry said, “Are you really charging that much, Abby?”
“For those that can afford it, yes. Most of that will go as a donation to the Hannah Foundation. The rest is a consultation fee to me, personally. My VR company is growing quickly and I need more funding. Also, I’m committing to cure nineteen other people for free for that price. I’m hoping to get at least five paying clients a year.”
“What are you going to do with a hundred million dollars?” This time Mark was asking.
“You’ll see soon enough. Jake, can I borrow those high-priced lawyers of yours again to come up with a contract? I’ll need a trustworthy third party to hold the funds and release them according to predetermined verifiable lab results. I also need a non-disclosure agreement that has to be signed by all members of the patient’s family.”
“Of course, Abby. I’ll set it all up. Why do you need the non-disclosure?”
“When someone as sick as Jennifer gets cured with an experimental treatment, you’re bound to get several types of reactions, none of which I want to deal with. Their doctors will want to know all the details and try to replicate the results. Some will call me a charlatan and others will demand that I treat more of their dying patients. Meanwhile, when Jennifer gets better, her support group will want to know all about her experience and they’ll want the same cure. Either way, I get way more attention than I want.”
Harry had a pained expression on his face. “Don’t you want to save their lives, if you can? You sound like those desperate people are a burden that you don’t want be bothered with.”
“It’s a question of resources, Harry. In terms of the treatment, it’s not easy to make and it’s based on some extremely rare and hard to grow plants and fungi. Each cure uses a good amount of product, so only between a hundred and two hundred treatments can be produced a year. I’m working on expanding the production, but there’s only so much I can do. The more people that know about this treatment, the more time I’ll need to spend turning them down. I’m not hardhearted, Harry. Telling parents of dying children that I can’t help them is not my favorite thing to do. This would be a problem even if I could make more. If I spent all day, every day, giving these treatments, I’d still need a full-time secretary to turn people down.
There’s another aspect to this as well. My time is a constrained resource. I’m growing the foundation, committing to treating over a hundred people every year, and studying to be a doctor. Am I required to live my life entirely for others or am I allowed to live my life as well?
Your university makes the same resource calculation every year. You decide how many scholarships you can give out and still maintain your budgets, student to teacher ratios, and dorm room spacing. Jake does it too. He doesn’t give away all his profits for the year to charity. He contributes to great organizations, but he has to set aside money for expansion, exploration, research, and for personal use.”
Harry put his hands up. “I surrender. I surrender. You’re right. I withdraw the question. As someone who is here because of your treatments, I can assure you that I didn’t mean to give offense.”
Harry put out his hand and as I shook it, he pulled me in for a hug. I felt bad for his students. They never got to see this playful side of their dean. All they got to see was his stern, unyielding facade.
I turned back to Jake and asked, “Will you stay on as a middleman for this or would you like me to call them and go through the arrangements?”
“I’d like to stay involved on this one. That way I can provide better information to the next patients I find. I also left out the part where their ‘healer’ is an eighteen-year-old, so it’ll be better if I’m around.”
“Good points. In that case, please let them know that I’ll have one of the cabins readied for them. The treatment course is seven days. I’ll spend a half hour with Jennifer every morning, alone, and then she’s free the rest of the day. The cabin sleep four people, so she can bring a few people to keep her company. She’ll have to stay on the property for the week and no food from anywhere else. That way I won’t have to worry about her eating anything that’s contraindicated for the treatment. I’ll also need to know if she has any allergies. Regarding my age and lack of credentials, I’m assuming that you’ll be there to greet them with me?”
“Yes, I’ll be there to add some grey hair to this endeavor. I’ll pass all that information and get the lawyers to make sure everything is ready, including making sure that the money is deposited in their account before treatment begins.”
“Thank you, Jake. Oh! I almost forgot. They need to sign a paper acknowledging that they’ve been informed that I am not a doctor and that I’m an unlicensed practitioner of alternative medicine and healing. I don’t want to be accused of misrepresenting myself as a doctor.”
Mark dropped me back at the hospital after dinner and I peeked in on mom, dad and Ben before I went back home for the night. Mom and Ben were already asleep and dad was keeping vigil over them. I gave him a hug and a kiss and told him I’d stop by tomorrow morning.
On the way home, I called Shauna with a list of things we’d need to get ready for Jennifer’s arrival.
The next four days were busy ones, with my studies, playing with Ben, training for my red belt, running VR simulation programming and setting up an ‘healing room’ in one of the conference room adjacent to the banquet hall. Thankfully, Monday soon arrived and the hard part was over. Now I just had the simple task of curing a woman of cancer that had metastasized all over her body. Ha!
Jake met me at the administration building of Hannah’s Home fifteen minutes before the Barnes family arrived. He told me that all the documents had been signed, the money transferred, and that everything was set.
“The only hiccup is the fiancé. Jim tells me that he’s been dead set against this whole thing and thinks it’s all a scam. You can count on him to be a pain in the ass.”
“So noted. I’ll try to be patient with him, but I won’t let him interfere with the treatment. If I have to, I’ll kick him out.”
“I figured as much and warned Jim about it. He understands. He’s also aware that backing out once the first treatment is given forfeits the entire sum. Jim says the fiancé, Michael, had been a rock throughout all this for Jennifer. He’s been by her side and has kept her smiling no matter how bad things got. Michael and Jennifer had just gotten to the point of accepting her fate when this new hope presented itself. Michael feels that the devastation of this further failure will break her and they’ll lose their last month together.”
I was saved from having to reassure Jake again that I’d be extra patient with Michael by the arrival of Jim and his family. They parked in one of the visitors parking spots and Jake, Shauna and I went over to greet them. To say that Shauna had been surprised that I was claiming that I could successfully treat terminally ill cancer patients would be a slight understatement. Despite her military conditioning to follow orders from her superior officers, she wasn’t shy about letting me know how skeptical she was of my claims and she took a few minutes to make sure that I was aware of how irresponsible it was of me to get people’s hopes up the way I was doing. Even using my trump card and reminding her that I’d kept my promise of freeing her brother didn’t help. She simply replied that while Roger was immensely skilled, he couldn’t cure cancer. I admitted that Roger wouldn’t be involved in this and I asked her to simply trust me and what she knew about my integrity. That finally managed to get through to her, but I could tell that I was skating on very thin ice with her. If I didn’t manage to help Jennifer, there was a good chance that Shauna wouldn’t continue working for me.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Upon exiting their car, Jim and his wife Amanda formed a grouping, while Jennifer and Michael formed another. Jennifer had the air of fragility that I’d encountered so often with the children in the hospital’s cancer ward. She was wearing a winter jacket, yet her recent loss of weight was obvious from her drawn face.
When Jake introduced me as Jennifer’s healer, I could tell that I was going to have a problem with Michael. His eyes flashed from mild resignation at having to be here to anger. My plan had been to be pleasant and win him over with results. That wasn’t going to work anymore.
“Before we go to your cabin and get your belonging secured, I need you to be aware that the treatment hasn’t started yet. You can still back out. Any contracts signed can be cancelled and all the monies deposited returned. I’m not making this offer because I doubt the treatment. I believe that it is Jennifer’s best chance for survival. However, once we start, you’ll be here for a week and I don’t want to have anyone trying to undermine the process and criticizing or questioning every aspect of the treatment.”
Michael took the bait. “Are you setting things up so that you can blame our lack of belief as an excuse for your treatment’s failure?”
“Not at all, Michael. The treatment doesn’t require your belief. It will either work or it won’t. I’m just not interested in dealing with you and your attitude towards the treatment. I can understand that you’re skeptical about it. Shauna here feels the same way. I don’t have a problem with that. What I can’t understand is what you think I have to gain if this is a scam? The signed documents are very clear that if Jennifer isn’t cancer free at the end of this treatment, I don’t get any of the payment. The determination of the status of her cancer will be done by a third-party that Jim has chosen. There is no way for me to fake the results. So, what is Jennifer’s downside to being here, much less yours? I’ll be housing you in a nice cabin and providing your meals for the next week. There’s an onsite medical clinic that can help with Jennifer’s care and Jennifer will be surrounded by you and her parents all day. None of you are losing any time with her besides the half hour I’ll spend with her every morning. Except for the weather being much colder than you’re used to, please tell me why you have a problem with Jennifer giving this treatment a try.”
Michael seemed at a loss. He’d grudgingly agreed to come and he hadn’t expected to be called out on his attitude, especially not within minutes of arriving. A fast attack is better than slow grinding battle. I waited for Michael to reply and before he could, Jennifer took his hand in hers and said, “She’s right, Mike. Try to think of this as a family vacation. Dad’s put all his business on hold for the week and you’re on-leave from teaching. Regardless of what happens, we’ll have quality time together. The only thing that’s changed is our surroundings. Aren’t you the one that always reminds your students that the only difference between a good day and a bad day is your attitude towards it?”
Michael closed his eyes and let out a breath. Then another. I could see his shoulder muscles relax and his entire demeanor changed. “You’re right, Jennifer, but what if this crazy treatment makes you worse. What if I lose you even faster?”
“Mike, as much as I’d like to stay around, a faster end to the pain would be welcome at this point.”
“Jennifer isn’t the first person that I’ve treated and I’ve seen no negative side effects so far. There is nothing toxic to the body in my formulation. It only attacks cancerous cells. If you don’t have cancer, it won’t do anything to you. I’d taken it myself, just to be sure.”
This last bit was news to Shauna and her expression said that we’d be having words about it later on. In the meantime, Michael agreed to have a better attitude about the whole thing and we got their bags stowed away in their cabin before going off to Clara’s clinic for a scan. Technically, I didn’t need a scan as I’d already scanned her and found all the cancer in her body. However, I felt that a detailed scan that could be matched to the previous imaging done on Jennifer would help reassure the family that we were capable of doing some science here.
When we reached the clinic, I had the family wait in the waiting room until I could start the machine and get it warmed up. This was just a delaying tactic so that I could enter in all her cancers into the system. I’d never had so many cancer spots to locate for just a single person and it took me a few minutes. Once I finished, I got Jennifer, completed her fake scan in a few minutes and printed out the results. They were impressed at how fast the whole process was and were a little shocked that I’d found four cancer clusters that the hospital had missed entirely. Not that it really made any difference, since the other nine areas were more than enough to kill Jennifer.
As I’d been hoping, the scan did help ease their minds about me a little. Not only had the scan been quick and painless, I’d also found all the cancers without having had access beforehand to Jennifer’s medical file. I was no longer a ‘quack’ in their minds.
That’s when I decided to blow all that credibility out the window and give Jennifer a McDonald’s vanilla milk shake to drink.
“I prefer the chocolate ones.” Jennifer said as I handed her the beverage.
“Yeah, but the chocolate is contra-indicated with the formulation. Besides, it’s too late. The medicine is already mixed in. Go on, drink up.”
Jennifer drank up as we exited the clinic and made our way to the other side of the building where I’d set up the meditation room. At the front door to that wing, I asked Shauna to escort everyone other than Jennifer back to the cabin and told them we’d join them afterwards for a tour of the property.
The meditation room had, until very recently, been a small conference room. I’d had Shauna remove the table and chairs and put quarter inch foam matting on the floor, going from wall to wall. All the windows had been covered over with a special type of film that allowed us to see out, yet blocking anyone from seeing in. The room was equipped with a very comfortable couch along one wall, two very large beanbag chairs along the window and dozens of pillows scattered all over the floor. The point was for the patient to get comfortable and I didn’t care how they chose to do that. Jennifer walked over to the couch and sat down slowly. I offered her a blanket and pulled over one of the beanbag chairs for myself.
“What happens now?” She asked.
“Once you finish that milkshake, we close our eyes and meditate. I’ll be honest with you and tell you that I suck at meditation. I usually go over all the things I have to get done. The mediation isn’t really the point. The medicine can mess with your balance and your sense of time for the first half hour and I thought it would be better to have a nice place to relax where you won’t fall down or get disoriented.”
“How can your sense of time get…” The sound of Jennifer’s voice stopped as I shifted her, and the couch she was on, to L2 and got to work. I had a lot of cancer to take care of. In the half hour that I had allotted for today, I was able to shift seven of the thirteen cancer clusters out of her body and get rid of all the loose cancer cells in the nearby tissue. The other six clusters I left in place for tomorrow, merely clipping off their access to sustenance from the body. The seven clusters that I’d removed were all sufficiently internal to the body so that there was no ‘lump’ that Jennifer could notice. Having a lump disappear within a half hour of taking the first dose of medication would be too suspicious. Twenty-four to forty-eight hours would be better. Ideally, a week would be best, only I didn’t have that much time. Hopefully their joy and wonder at Jennifer’s recovery would cloud any suspicions that what had been achieved was highly unlikely.
“…missed up?” Jennifer finished her question as I brought her back to reality. She looked confused as from her perspective, I’d moved across the room in an eyeblink. I was no longer sitting comfortably in the beanbag chair, but was instead leaning against the wall, near the door.
“Are you ready to head back to the cabin and get that tour of Hannah’s Home?” I asked guilelessly.
A very confused Jennifer answered, “We just sat down. How did you get over there?”
“That’s what I meant by the medication messing with your sense of time. We’ve been here for half an hour. It’s time to head back.”
I helped Jennifer up and we returned to the cabin.
“How do you feel?” Michael asked when we got back.
“Weird. Really weird. How long were we gone for?”
“Half an hour or so. Why?”
“It only seemed like a minute or two to me. I’m ok now though, just a bit disoriented.”
“Do you want to take a nap and we can do the tour later?” Shauna asked.
“No. I’m good. I have a bit of energy now. I won’t later.”
On Wednesday morning, our third day of treatment, I removed the last cluster of cancer cells from her body. She still had some cancer cells in her body though and over the next four sessions I’d be hunting them down and getting rid of them. When I was done, the cancer would have a tougher time coming back. I’d also instruct her to come see me for a scan every year, just to be safe.
When I came back from the hospital later on that day, Shauna caught up with me on the way to VR Health Services.
“I’m sorry for doubting you, Abby.”
“Huh?”
“About Jennifer and the cancer treatment. I’m sorry I gave you such a rough time. I should have trusted you and what I know of you.”
“No, you shouldn’t have. You were right to be skeptical and I’m glad that you feel that you can challenge me when you think I’m doing something wrong. I’m much rather have that than blind obedience. Please don’t hesitate to let me know when you think I’m making a mistake. Uhm…what brought about this change of heart all of a sudden?”
“Jennifer did. She says that her breast cancer is gone. She can’t feel the lumps there anymore. She also says that she’s feeling a lot better, has more energy and that her pain is gone. Michael was in tears when they came to tell me about it. Jim and Amanda hugged me as if I had something to do with any of it. Is her cancer really gone?”
“Most of it is. She probably has some cancer cells still roaming around, but the next four days of treatment should take care of them.”
“Wow! Abby, if you can do that, why are you bothering with the VR stuff? It’s cool, but hardly on the same level as curing cancer.”
“I can only produce enough treatments for around a hundred patients a year. That’s only one hour a day of my time. Also, the VR stuff has more benefit than you realize. Do you know how many people die each year from medical errors? If the VR system can reduce that by only a few percent, I can help save more lives that I can treat with my cancer treatment. The cancer treatment is flashier because it produces so much benefit to a few people. The VR system can provide a little help to hundreds of thousands of people. The VR system isn’t as sexy because it’s impossible to measure its results. You can’t measure negative outcomes that never occurred.”
On Sunday afternoon, Jennifer underwent testing and imaging at one of the top hospitals in Charlotte and by Tuesday afternoon, Jake called to notify me that the money had been successfully transferred over to me and to the foundation. Since Jim had delivered on the payment, I was now committed to taking on nineteen more patients and I entrusted Shauna and Sister Clara to find those candidates for me from all over the country. I was already causing a minor stir at the hospital, since none of their pediatric cancer patients had died in the past six months. I didn’t want to compound that by having nine-teen ‘miracle’ cures happen in the Charlotte area alone.