NOTE: The treatment of cancer is an involved, multi-stage process that forces the patient to exchange their previous life for a new one. For some the change is for the worse -- the ones that lose the battle, despite fighting with all their heart, and with the support of the best in medicine. For those that win the battle, the path to 'victory' is not easy. The path consists of three parts: initial diagnosis, treatment, remission. Given what we have learned about the human body and it's relationship to cancer, there are some in the medical community who are convinced that much like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, cancer is neither totally predictable, nor totally curable, hence my use of the term 'remission' rather than 'cure'. Patients often agonize over the 'Why me?' syndrome. They spend hours looking back over their lives to try to determine what they did 'wrong', to end up with cancer. Many times this is an empty search, which is both frustrating and demoralizing, making it harder to keep a positive attitude when going through the treatments, and to have the confidence needed to help themselves in the fight.
Chapter 21: Special Side Effects
Once again Reg, dragged himself, from a deep sleep, to consciousness. Again, he finds himself immersed in the motion-limiting goo. "I remember. They called this stuff 'biomemetic' gel." Reg also remembered what kind of pain moving around in this stuff caused, so he stayed still, trying to remember what had happened before Nurse Clarice sent him off to sleep.
Somehow, the fabric that now substituted for his skin gave him the ability to not only 'see' illness, but when he touched the sick, he was able to 'see' into another dimension - a strange world inhabited by shadowy monsters that apparently caused sickness and robbed the life out of their victims. "Christ. If I ever mentioned this to anyone, they'd slap me in the looney bin for sure!"
As he lay there, eyes closed, recalling the rest of the events that had transpired he remembered the white-haired, flower dressed old lady that also seemed to exist only in the world between reality and disease. He also remembered he could not look directly at her, which was strange, but he also remembered here calming touch and soft even spoken voice that reminded him of a Sunday school teacher he once had. "Man, and if I tried to describe Gloria to anyone, they would throw away the key."
Polly had been sitting at his side - Reg noticed the green glow that surrounded her - he was beginning to get used to that. Reg was trying to talk her, trying to tell her what he had seen, but all that came out was, "Gloria. Gloria!"
Reg's outburst, once a woke her up. Startled awake she, she looked at her husband, suspended in the gel, then glanced at her watch.... 3:00 A.M.
"Reg, I'm here. I'm right here!" She leaned over the tank to look at her husband, letting him see that she was at his bed side. "Who is Gloria? You have mentioned her a couple times now. Is she a nurse? Is she a doctor?" This mystery woman was becoming a sore point for Polly. If he was keeping secrets from her, it would set them back months in their therapy - They had come so far. If Reg was indeed cheating on her, that would be it. Illness or not, Polly would not share him with anyone else. She was doing her best to remain calm, to keep the emotion out of her voice.
"What? Glor... Gloria. Oh, God, was I talking about her? Jeezus, I'm sorry." Reg said. Now fully awake and trying to figure out how to explain this strange figure from the world between to his wife. He was certain that she thought he was cheating again on her. But he was not. "Oh, God. How am I going to explain this? I don't even understand it myself."
Chapter 22: One Last Chance
NEWTON, KANSAS - 1931
There she sat, on her old tattered suitcase. She didn't even try to get out of the dust kicked up by the swirling summer winds. They were convinced she had gone mad. The old, sick woman had finally gone over the edge. What she was doing was simply beyond belief, but they could only watch, shaking their heads in disbelief.
Her two youngest daughters Violet - her sixth daughter, and Corabelle - her seventh stood on the platform as the train pulled into the now deserted station. The rest of her 11 children had scattered east and south after the market crash of 1929, combined with the drought, left little opportunities for them to scratch out a living on the 800 acres of family farm land.
Making its one stop for water, the engine released steam, as if enjoying a well deserved pause in it's long westward journey. Slowly the old woman rose, brushed the dust from her blue floral dress, shook free the lace shall around her shoulders, the dust shimmering in the late afternoon sun, and boarded the train.
As she reached the edge of the platform and reached for the train, her grand daughter, Lizzabeth, broke free from her mothers grip back at the station door and came running to her.
"Grammy, Glo! Grammy Glo! Don't leave me!" the little girl hugged her tightly, her tears turning the dust on her pink cheeks into a brown mud as they ran down her face.
Bending carefully, the old woman pulled the child, gently from her. "It's alright, Deary. It's alright." she said, smiling in the way that always made Lizzabeth happy. "I'm going west, dear child, to take one more chance to get better."
Lizzabeth looked into her Grammy's blue eyes, eyes in which she always saw the ocean, and was suddenly not afraid of losing her Grammy anymore. "Go get better, Grammy. Go get better."
With that the little girl turned back to her parents, and the old lady boarded the train. The porter, with the grey sideburns curling out from under his tightly fitting cap, helped her to her seat, punching her ticket, "One way, all the way to California."
She sat, carefully, pulling her shall around her shoulders, "Yes, I am going to the University of Southern California."
"Well, now," the porter said, placing her suitcase under the seat next to her. "Are you sure you're old enough to go to college?"
Smiling back at him she said, "Why thank you, Deary, you are too kind." she settled back into her seat, adjusting the cushion as the train tugged it's way out of the station.
Looking out the window, one last time at the family she left behind, waving to her from their spot on the dusty platform. She knew she would not see them in this world again.
"Damn, crazy old woman." her daughter, Corabelle, Lizzabeth's mother muttered, "What a waste of money. She sold OUR land to go to California for some dingy treatment for her cancer."
Taking care to cover the young girls ears, she turned to her sister, "You know it's not gonna work."
Watching the smoke angle away from the rail line as the train made it's way westward, Violet, the youngest of the old lady's daughters said in reply, "When they send us the telegram that she has died, we will just go get her and bring her home."
After a two day journey, the train slowed to a rest inside Union Station in Los Angeles. The old woman, rose, and once again with the help of the porter, she made her way to the shiny metal platform. The cool of the station energized her after the trip on the stifling train. She stood, looking around, the Doctors said they would send someone to meet her.
Despite her age and her disease, she still had the vision of a hawk, honed after years of life on her Kansas farm, watching the cattle return, and keeping an eye out for the return of the men-folk, always dusty, always hungry and always a bit ornery. So she quickly saw the sign with her name on it, held by a young looking doctor in a crisp suit, and a nurse with a smart white skirt and blue jacket, her nurses cap contrasting with her flowing red hair. "Gloria Prescott" she made her way over to them, greeted each with a hug and the led her to the waiting car.
Chapter 23: A Brave New Treatment - Mortal Oscillatory Resonance
To his right sat a stack of 14 manilla folders, each containing notes, charts, lab results and signed consent forms. To his left sat a press-pot of Brazilian Arabica coffee, and a bright red mug emblazoned with the gold letters USC on the side, the nurse having just poured exactly 9 ounces into his 10 ounce mug.
Across the table sat 14 patients, men and women, ranging in age from 19 to 90. Gloria Prestcott, 72 sat in the chair with '12' taped to the back. All 14 people had the same strange expression on their faces; exhaustion from travel, exhaustion from previous treatments, exhaustion from the ravishing effects of their various cancers, yet there was - in each of them - a quizzical expression of hope. Hope, for most, all they have to cling to, a last chance to stay alive, even if only for a little bit longer. For Gloria Prescott, her hope was to get 6 more months. July 5th, 1931, the 7th birthday of the 7th daughter, of her 7th child. A good omen, as she always told Lizzabeth, she was her good omen, and Gloria was determined to return home to light the candles on the cake.
Despite his dashing appearance - tailored suit, pressed shirt, thin blue tie, Gloria noted that he slurped his coffee in a most un-refined manner, bringing her back to the present, from thoughts of her grand daughter. The doctor rose, and moved around to the front of the table to the space in front of the seated patients.
"O.K. Well, everything is ready. I hope your respective journeys were uneventful, and that you are prepared to go forward with our experimental trials." Dr. Doyal Raymond Reef, a scientist who was working on the edges of regular science with regard to treating cancer, in fact, his approach was considered 'crazy', 'outlandish' and even 'dangerous' by some more conservative standards.
At the time the predominant treatment involved radical surgery to remove tumorous tissue as well as surrounding healthy tissue to get a safe margin. There were other, experimental treatments that were in use; radiation, chemotherapy and finally, Dr. Reef's technique called, Mortal Oscillatory Resonance, or MOR.
The quiet, well made-up nurse handed out materials to the patients as the doctor described the treatment they were to undergo. The doctor paced rapidly back and forth, swinging his stethoscope like a child and explaining how his technique used sound, matched to the frequency generated by the cancer cells to destroy the cancerous cells, while leaving all other cells undamaged.
Gloria flipped through the pages, gazing at the machine, trying to understand the charts, all the stuff about frequency matching, mega-hertz, multiple treatments, side effects. Being a simple woman in many ways, and very polite, Gloria carefully stacked the papers, and closed the folder, placing it in her lap. Smiling, she continued to listen.
Next the doctor led the fourteen patients to the treatment room, which contained the machine where they would receive their treatment. It was massive. Surrounding the seemingly tiny gurney were a mind boggling array of tubes, monitors, dials, gauges, reflector dishes and wires, all terminating at the bed.
Always a perceptive woman, she could sense that her fellow patients had questions, did not quite understand either, so, she raised her hand, very shyly, like she did back in the prairie school in Mrs. Monroe's one room school house.
"Excuse me, Dr. Reef. How many people have received this...treatment?" silence filled the room. Even Dr. Reef stopped talking, only the massive machine continued to whir, hum, click and beep.
Dr. Reef took a large slurp of coffee, setting it carefully down on the edge of the gurney, "Hmmm. Well, it's like this, you fourteen brave people will be the first."
The doctor looked at each one of them, "You have all signed the release form, the pink paper in your folder. But, I want you to know, it is not too late to back out of this trial, though I hope you don't."
He looked directly at Gloria now, "We have so much to learn from this treatment protocol, so we need all of you."
From behind Gloria a tall, bearded man who looked to be the size of a grizzly bear to Gloria spoke up, "O.K. doc. I'm Number 1, so lets get started, I got a thousand head of cattle coming in from a drive to my ranch in Texas in about two months. I need to be all healed up and ready to do some brandin'."
"Allright, see nurse Hampton and she will get you scheduled." the doctor said, retrieved his mug, slurped from it again, smacked his lips and said. "O.K. then. Good luck and we will see you all soon."
Chapter 24: Trouble on the Table
It took almost two weeks for the doctors to get to Gloria. By then she had become comfortable with the routine. Morning meetings with the medical teams - updates on the patients in the trial. They had lost Marcus, a steelworker from Chicago the third day of the trial. On the seventh day, Gloria had breakfast with Collette, a textile worker from Memphis, and before lunch she too had died. Today, Dr. Reef reported that Tommy, the 19 year old from St. Louis, who had just been accepted to college in Indiana, was very sick and probably would not make it much longer. Their original group of fourteen had now been reduced by cancer to 11, and today it was Gloria's turn for her first treatment.
As she walked down the hallway to the treatment room, she noticed the distinct smell of burning electrical circuits - her husband was a ham radio nut, and the odor filled her kitchen for years. Inside the room, what appeared to be an army of blue-suited technicians were crawling all over the room-sized machine, running new wires, tossing out burned components, one poor technician was at a table with a pile of melted tubes and wires trying to make notes and scribbling mathematical equations.
The doctor led Gloria to a changing room off the main treatment room and she could clearly hear the conversation outside the thin wooden door. "You don't have to change clothes, but you do need to put your belongings in the locker." the nurse said.
"No, no, NO! It is NOT going to work!" said one voice.
"Listen, Stevens. It WILL work. I've been up all night calibrating the audio generator. It's been stable on every test." she recognized this as the voice of 'bespectacled technician'
"I, I, I, don't think so. Look at these numbers. They are not right." it was the voice of the young tech doing all the math behind the pile of melted parts.
The first voice snapped, "Foster, shut-up! What can YOU know, you've only been on this project a couple of weeks."
The voice she now knew of as Foster, mumbled as he passed the changing room door, "If it's not right... and the machine overproduces the wrong frequency... and it goes out of phase... it's gonna be a damn disaster. I'm glad I'm not in charge."
Gloria had carefully closed the locker, opened the door, and put on her cheeriest face as she approached the treatment table. "Well, Deary." she said to the doctor as he walked over to her.
"Is everything o.k.?" Gloria asked.
Dr. Reef could see the concern and shot a look to the technicians that said, 'Could you SHUT the hell UP!' he walked Gloria to the table.
"Now, just lie down here and we will start the treatment." the doctor said, summoning two nurses to help her onto the table.
As she lay down on the table, she reached out for the doctors hand, "It's o.k., Deary. It will work just fine."
The doctor cleared the room, the technicians began the count down, the machine began to whir, parts spun, needles jumped and energy filled the room.
What happened next has not been reported in any journal, or write up in any news paper, but the end result is that Dr. Reef was labled a crack-pot, and his research into this cancer treatment was abandoned.
As the voltage built up to the point to where it was to deliver the proper 'dose' of sound, one of the technicians noticed a bundle of wires begin to glow, and then melt along one of the huge electro magnets that controlled the frequency generated by the machine. There was a flash, and the treatment room seemed to expand like a bubble and then just as quickly retract. The resulting sonic blast knocked out everyone in the room, several people in the hall outside the room and a janitor on the floor above.
When they all regained consciousness the treatment room appeared normal except for two things, the melted wires and the damaged electro magnet...and their patient, Gloria Prescott, 72, suffering from a third battle with advanced metatastic breast cancer, had vanished. While no one actually saw her leave, it was recorded in her chart that she, 'left the study, and the hospital, on her own'.
Back in Newton, Kansas her family waited for word from their grandmother, and a little girl waited for her special friend to return from California to light the candles on her cake. When the family contacted the USC Medical Center, they were only told that she had checked her self out and was last seen at the hospital.
For Gloria, she remembered the pulse of energy, remembered a bright light, then woke, in another hospital room. In another hospital. The parents of a little girl sobbing as the doctor talked about her cancer. The little girl turned her head, with great effort, and smiled at Gloria.
Gloria saw the parents turn toward the bed, and said, "But, look. Doctor! She's smiling! She hasn't smiled in weeks."
Chapter 21: Special Side Effects
Once again Reg, dragged himself, from a deep sleep, to consciousness. Again, he finds himself immersed in the motion-limiting goo. "I remember. They called this stuff 'biomemetic' gel." Reg also remembered what kind of pain moving around in this stuff caused, so he stayed still, trying to remember what had happened before Nurse Clarice sent him off to sleep.
Somehow, the fabric that now substituted for his skin gave him the ability to not only 'see' illness, but when he touched the sick, he was able to 'see' into another dimension - a strange world inhabited by shadowy monsters that apparently caused sickness and robbed the life out of their victims. "Christ. If I ever mentioned this to anyone, they'd slap me in the looney bin for sure!"
As he lay there, eyes closed, recalling the rest of the events that had transpired he remembered the white-haired, flower dressed old lady that also seemed to exist only in the world between reality and disease. He also remembered he could not look directly at her, which was strange, but he also remembered here calming touch and soft even spoken voice that reminded him of a Sunday school teacher he once had. "Man, and if I tried to describe Gloria to anyone, they would throw away the key."
Polly had been sitting at his side - Reg noticed the green glow that surrounded her - he was beginning to get used to that. Reg was trying to talk her, trying to tell her what he had seen, but all that came out was, "Gloria. Gloria!"
Reg's outburst, once a woke her up. Startled awake she, she looked at her husband, suspended in the gel, then glanced at her watch.... 3:00 A.M.
"Reg, I'm here. I'm right here!" She leaned over the tank to look at her husband, letting him see that she was at his bed side. "Who is Gloria? You have mentioned her a couple times now. Is she a nurse? Is she a doctor?" This mystery woman was becoming a sore point for Polly. If he was keeping secrets from her, it would set them back months in their therapy - They had come so far. If Reg was indeed cheating on her, that would be it. Illness or not, Polly would not share him with anyone else. She was doing her best to remain calm, to keep the emotion out of her voice.
"What? Glor... Gloria. Oh, God, was I talking about her? Jeezus, I'm sorry." Reg said. Now fully awake and trying to figure out how to explain this strange figure from the world between to his wife. He was certain that she thought he was cheating again on her. But he was not. "Oh, God. How am I going to explain this? I don't even understand it myself."
Chapter 22: One Last Chance
NEWTON, KANSAS - 1931
There she sat, on her old tattered suitcase. She didn't even try to get out of the dust kicked up by the swirling summer winds. They were convinced she had gone mad. The old, sick woman had finally gone over the edge. What she was doing was simply beyond belief, but they could only watch, shaking their heads in disbelief.
Her two youngest daughters Violet - her sixth daughter, and Corabelle - her seventh stood on the platform as the train pulled into the now deserted station. The rest of her 11 children had scattered east and south after the market crash of 1929, combined with the drought, left little opportunities for them to scratch out a living on the 800 acres of family farm land.
Making its one stop for water, the engine released steam, as if enjoying a well deserved pause in it's long westward journey. Slowly the old woman rose, brushed the dust from her blue floral dress, shook free the lace shall around her shoulders, the dust shimmering in the late afternoon sun, and boarded the train.
As she reached the edge of the platform and reached for the train, her grand daughter, Lizzabeth, broke free from her mothers grip back at the station door and came running to her.
"Grammy, Glo! Grammy Glo! Don't leave me!" the little girl hugged her tightly, her tears turning the dust on her pink cheeks into a brown mud as they ran down her face.
Bending carefully, the old woman pulled the child, gently from her. "It's alright, Deary. It's alright." she said, smiling in the way that always made Lizzabeth happy. "I'm going west, dear child, to take one more chance to get better."
Lizzabeth looked into her Grammy's blue eyes, eyes in which she always saw the ocean, and was suddenly not afraid of losing her Grammy anymore. "Go get better, Grammy. Go get better."
With that the little girl turned back to her parents, and the old lady boarded the train. The porter, with the grey sideburns curling out from under his tightly fitting cap, helped her to her seat, punching her ticket, "One way, all the way to California."
She sat, carefully, pulling her shall around her shoulders, "Yes, I am going to the University of Southern California."
"Well, now," the porter said, placing her suitcase under the seat next to her. "Are you sure you're old enough to go to college?"
Smiling back at him she said, "Why thank you, Deary, you are too kind." she settled back into her seat, adjusting the cushion as the train tugged it's way out of the station.
Looking out the window, one last time at the family she left behind, waving to her from their spot on the dusty platform. She knew she would not see them in this world again.
"Damn, crazy old woman." her daughter, Corabelle, Lizzabeth's mother muttered, "What a waste of money. She sold OUR land to go to California for some dingy treatment for her cancer."
Taking care to cover the young girls ears, she turned to her sister, "You know it's not gonna work."
Watching the smoke angle away from the rail line as the train made it's way westward, Violet, the youngest of the old lady's daughters said in reply, "When they send us the telegram that she has died, we will just go get her and bring her home."
After a two day journey, the train slowed to a rest inside Union Station in Los Angeles. The old woman, rose, and once again with the help of the porter, she made her way to the shiny metal platform. The cool of the station energized her after the trip on the stifling train. She stood, looking around, the Doctors said they would send someone to meet her.
Despite her age and her disease, she still had the vision of a hawk, honed after years of life on her Kansas farm, watching the cattle return, and keeping an eye out for the return of the men-folk, always dusty, always hungry and always a bit ornery. So she quickly saw the sign with her name on it, held by a young looking doctor in a crisp suit, and a nurse with a smart white skirt and blue jacket, her nurses cap contrasting with her flowing red hair. "Gloria Prescott" she made her way over to them, greeted each with a hug and the led her to the waiting car.
Chapter 23: A Brave New Treatment - Mortal Oscillatory Resonance
To his right sat a stack of 14 manilla folders, each containing notes, charts, lab results and signed consent forms. To his left sat a press-pot of Brazilian Arabica coffee, and a bright red mug emblazoned with the gold letters USC on the side, the nurse having just poured exactly 9 ounces into his 10 ounce mug.
Across the table sat 14 patients, men and women, ranging in age from 19 to 90. Gloria Prestcott, 72 sat in the chair with '12' taped to the back. All 14 people had the same strange expression on their faces; exhaustion from travel, exhaustion from previous treatments, exhaustion from the ravishing effects of their various cancers, yet there was - in each of them - a quizzical expression of hope. Hope, for most, all they have to cling to, a last chance to stay alive, even if only for a little bit longer. For Gloria Prescott, her hope was to get 6 more months. July 5th, 1931, the 7th birthday of the 7th daughter, of her 7th child. A good omen, as she always told Lizzabeth, she was her good omen, and Gloria was determined to return home to light the candles on the cake.
Despite his dashing appearance - tailored suit, pressed shirt, thin blue tie, Gloria noted that he slurped his coffee in a most un-refined manner, bringing her back to the present, from thoughts of her grand daughter. The doctor rose, and moved around to the front of the table to the space in front of the seated patients.
"O.K. Well, everything is ready. I hope your respective journeys were uneventful, and that you are prepared to go forward with our experimental trials." Dr. Doyal Raymond Reef, a scientist who was working on the edges of regular science with regard to treating cancer, in fact, his approach was considered 'crazy', 'outlandish' and even 'dangerous' by some more conservative standards.
At the time the predominant treatment involved radical surgery to remove tumorous tissue as well as surrounding healthy tissue to get a safe margin. There were other, experimental treatments that were in use; radiation, chemotherapy and finally, Dr. Reef's technique called, Mortal Oscillatory Resonance, or MOR.
The quiet, well made-up nurse handed out materials to the patients as the doctor described the treatment they were to undergo. The doctor paced rapidly back and forth, swinging his stethoscope like a child and explaining how his technique used sound, matched to the frequency generated by the cancer cells to destroy the cancerous cells, while leaving all other cells undamaged.
Gloria flipped through the pages, gazing at the machine, trying to understand the charts, all the stuff about frequency matching, mega-hertz, multiple treatments, side effects. Being a simple woman in many ways, and very polite, Gloria carefully stacked the papers, and closed the folder, placing it in her lap. Smiling, she continued to listen.
Next the doctor led the fourteen patients to the treatment room, which contained the machine where they would receive their treatment. It was massive. Surrounding the seemingly tiny gurney were a mind boggling array of tubes, monitors, dials, gauges, reflector dishes and wires, all terminating at the bed.
Always a perceptive woman, she could sense that her fellow patients had questions, did not quite understand either, so, she raised her hand, very shyly, like she did back in the prairie school in Mrs. Monroe's one room school house.
"Excuse me, Dr. Reef. How many people have received this...treatment?" silence filled the room. Even Dr. Reef stopped talking, only the massive machine continued to whir, hum, click and beep.
Dr. Reef took a large slurp of coffee, setting it carefully down on the edge of the gurney, "Hmmm. Well, it's like this, you fourteen brave people will be the first."
The doctor looked at each one of them, "You have all signed the release form, the pink paper in your folder. But, I want you to know, it is not too late to back out of this trial, though I hope you don't."
He looked directly at Gloria now, "We have so much to learn from this treatment protocol, so we need all of you."
From behind Gloria a tall, bearded man who looked to be the size of a grizzly bear to Gloria spoke up, "O.K. doc. I'm Number 1, so lets get started, I got a thousand head of cattle coming in from a drive to my ranch in Texas in about two months. I need to be all healed up and ready to do some brandin'."
"Allright, see nurse Hampton and she will get you scheduled." the doctor said, retrieved his mug, slurped from it again, smacked his lips and said. "O.K. then. Good luck and we will see you all soon."
Chapter 24: Trouble on the Table
It took almost two weeks for the doctors to get to Gloria. By then she had become comfortable with the routine. Morning meetings with the medical teams - updates on the patients in the trial. They had lost Marcus, a steelworker from Chicago the third day of the trial. On the seventh day, Gloria had breakfast with Collette, a textile worker from Memphis, and before lunch she too had died. Today, Dr. Reef reported that Tommy, the 19 year old from St. Louis, who had just been accepted to college in Indiana, was very sick and probably would not make it much longer. Their original group of fourteen had now been reduced by cancer to 11, and today it was Gloria's turn for her first treatment.
As she walked down the hallway to the treatment room, she noticed the distinct smell of burning electrical circuits - her husband was a ham radio nut, and the odor filled her kitchen for years. Inside the room, what appeared to be an army of blue-suited technicians were crawling all over the room-sized machine, running new wires, tossing out burned components, one poor technician was at a table with a pile of melted tubes and wires trying to make notes and scribbling mathematical equations.
The doctor led Gloria to a changing room off the main treatment room and she could clearly hear the conversation outside the thin wooden door. "You don't have to change clothes, but you do need to put your belongings in the locker." the nurse said.
"No, no, NO! It is NOT going to work!" said one voice.
"Listen, Stevens. It WILL work. I've been up all night calibrating the audio generator. It's been stable on every test." she recognized this as the voice of 'bespectacled technician'
"I, I, I, don't think so. Look at these numbers. They are not right." it was the voice of the young tech doing all the math behind the pile of melted parts.
The first voice snapped, "Foster, shut-up! What can YOU know, you've only been on this project a couple of weeks."
The voice she now knew of as Foster, mumbled as he passed the changing room door, "If it's not right... and the machine overproduces the wrong frequency... and it goes out of phase... it's gonna be a damn disaster. I'm glad I'm not in charge."
Gloria had carefully closed the locker, opened the door, and put on her cheeriest face as she approached the treatment table. "Well, Deary." she said to the doctor as he walked over to her.
"Is everything o.k.?" Gloria asked.
Dr. Reef could see the concern and shot a look to the technicians that said, 'Could you SHUT the hell UP!' he walked Gloria to the table.
"Now, just lie down here and we will start the treatment." the doctor said, summoning two nurses to help her onto the table.
As she lay down on the table, she reached out for the doctors hand, "It's o.k., Deary. It will work just fine."
The doctor cleared the room, the technicians began the count down, the machine began to whir, parts spun, needles jumped and energy filled the room.
What happened next has not been reported in any journal, or write up in any news paper, but the end result is that Dr. Reef was labled a crack-pot, and his research into this cancer treatment was abandoned.
As the voltage built up to the point to where it was to deliver the proper 'dose' of sound, one of the technicians noticed a bundle of wires begin to glow, and then melt along one of the huge electro magnets that controlled the frequency generated by the machine. There was a flash, and the treatment room seemed to expand like a bubble and then just as quickly retract. The resulting sonic blast knocked out everyone in the room, several people in the hall outside the room and a janitor on the floor above.
When they all regained consciousness the treatment room appeared normal except for two things, the melted wires and the damaged electro magnet...and their patient, Gloria Prescott, 72, suffering from a third battle with advanced metatastic breast cancer, had vanished. While no one actually saw her leave, it was recorded in her chart that she, 'left the study, and the hospital, on her own'.
Back in Newton, Kansas her family waited for word from their grandmother, and a little girl waited for her special friend to return from California to light the candles on her cake. When the family contacted the USC Medical Center, they were only told that she had checked her self out and was last seen at the hospital.
For Gloria, she remembered the pulse of energy, remembered a bright light, then woke, in another hospital room. In another hospital. The parents of a little girl sobbing as the doctor talked about her cancer. The little girl turned her head, with great effort, and smiled at Gloria.
Gloria saw the parents turn toward the bed, and said, "But, look. Doctor! She's smiling! She hasn't smiled in weeks."
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