“It’s not the risk to him that I’m worried about,” Yuri says. “Okay, he’s my boss and if he loses his license, I lose my job. And, of course, I actually respect him and I would hate to see something bad happen to him, but Grace, I’ve seen countless patients who’ve gone through clinical trials. Sometimes they come out the other side better off for their inclusion, but a lot of times it goes the other way.”
“Well, if it weren’t safe, they wouldn’t test it on people, would they?”
“They wouldn’t knowingly test a drug they knew to be more harmful than helpful,” she answers. “At least, that’s what I like to think, but you’ve got to understand that you’re in one of the very first test groups for this drug. There’s a lot they don’t know about it.”
“It’s worth a shot, though,” I tell her. “If anything goes the wrong way, they’ll take me off of it, right?”
“Yeah, but a lot of times, they don’t know that something’s going the wrong way until it’s already past the point of no return. You could lose years of your life or you could develop new symptoms, symptoms that may or may not respond to treatment. I just want to make sure you’re going into this with all of the facts.”
“Hey, on the bright side, they might put me on the placebo,” I laugh, trying to cover my trepidation.
“That’s true,” she says, “but in that case, you’re going to be risking Dr. Churchill’s job, reputation, and license over something that’s not actually going to help you.”
“So you don’t think I should do it?”
“I’m not saying that,” she says. “I’m just saying that I want you to be prepared that this might not go the way you’re hoping it will, the way Dr. Churchill and I are hoping it will.”
There’s a knock on the door, and I get up to answer it.
“He’s probably going to tell you a lot of what I’ve been telling you,” Yuri says, “but I can’t be sure of that.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell me?” I ask.
“I know he’s got a soft spot when it comes to you. He likes you, and I wanted to make absolutely certain that somebody told you the things you need to know before you make a firm commitment to this.”
“Are you staying? He knows we’re friends, it’s all right.”
“I’ll say hi,” she says, “but I think I should leave the two of you to go over the details — plausible deniability and all that.”
“Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll call you later and let you know how it goes.”
She nods and gets to the door. Answering it, she says, “She’s inside. Don’t sugarcoat this.”
“I won’t,” Jace answers. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Yuri.”
The door closes, and I’m sitting down again when he comes into the room.
“She knows that she can’t be seen to have had any part of this, right?” I ask him.
“Of course,” he says. “The last thing I’d want to do would be to put her at risk with what we’re doing.”
“So tell me,” I start, “what kind of results have other trials of this drug had?”
“There’s not a lot of data yet,” he says. “An earlier form of the drug was recalled before trials were over because it was shown to actually cause patients with grade two oligodendroglioma to progress to grade three.”
“I’m guessing that’s the wrong direction?” I ask, knowing very well what grade three means. It means that my chance of being alive in five years would be cut in half.
“Yeah,” he says. “They did another trial of this version of the drug, and it’s shown some improvement in over 60 percent of patients, 30 percent over the placebo.”
“That’s so weird,” I muse.
“What’s that?”
“That 30 percent of people get better when they’re told they’re getting something that would make them better,” I tell him. “Maybe you should start handing out sugar pills along with your other treatments.”
“The problem with the placebo effect,” he explains, “is that it usually doesn’t last for any significant period of time. After a while, patients stop making the improvements and they return to where they were before they were on a placebo in the first place.”
“Still,” I tell him, “that’s got to buy some time at least, right?”