If Only Three Months Earlier

“It was just here!” I said again, fighting back the tears that threatened to overflow my eyes. I reached a shaking hand down into my white lab coat pocket and closed my eyes while hoping for the feel of cold glass meeting my fingertips.

The crisp touch of the sterilized lab coat pocket was what my fingers slid against and nothing more. Swallowing the hard lump that was rising in my throat, I forced my eyes open and stepped back over to where I had been sitting at my desk which housed several microscopes. For more than three hours on end, I had been sitting there staring through the eyepiece and even refusing the fresh pizza brought in by the head lab technician as a grateful gesture to his whole staff. Yet only a few of us had been scheduled to work Thanksgiving Day, I had thought to myself in amusement. Well, I had been one of the lucky ones not scheduled to work the holiday, but I had awoken at five in the morning to get an early start to the lab underneath the Densmore Hospital.

My eyes had been falling closed every half mile it seemed, but I had tightened my grip on the steering wheel and forced my attention to the highway and not on the regrets I had about not spending the day at home. The fact was, I imagined I had regrets because I knew I should have some instead of this desire to get as far away as I could from there.

“Why are you here?” one of my coworkers Tom had grumbled as soon as I had stepped foot in the laboratory. He had barely glanced up from the drops of iodine he was vigilantly putting into a solution.

“I have work to be done,” I said simply, giving the other technicians a smile and a nod as I looked about the room. “How’s that synthesis going?”

“Carter, you told us about your plans for Thanksgiving,” an older woman named Lisa declared in confusion.

I shook my head and let my eyes fall to my computer on the desk that I had claimed as my own. “That’s what we did last year. This is a completely different year, and I don’t expect that things will be the same.”

“Oh, come on. Family traditions can outlast more than a small feud or whatever else large families get into,” Lisa insisted as she walked over and leaned against the edge of my desk. “Carter, families are always there for each other.”

“I’m sorry, but I just don’t want to talk about this,” I murmured while deftly typing in my computer’s security code and sitting down with a sigh into my chair. “I have work to be done…”

“You work more than fifty hours a week,” spoke up Ian Johnson, the IT man that kept our hospital systems up and running without fail. “I think you can at least have one day off to go home and rest. Besides, that’ll give me time to reboot your computer before it burns out.”

“My computer is not going to burn out,” I replied emphatically. “I don’t use it nearly as much as I do the lab tech.”

“My point is, it’s Thanksgiving. Go home and rest before you burn out yourself,” Ian grinned with a shake of his head.

By this time, I had felt my temper beginning to rise in my chest and flattening the tranquility I had felt inside of myself when I had woken up. In all actuality, I knew that I had been doing better on this day than I had expected, but now I could feel my self-control slipping. I inhaled a deep breath and kept my eyes fixed on my computer screen where my fingers were typing subconsciously. Squinting in the poor light of the lab, I tried to make out through blurred eyes what exactly I had been writing, but none of it made any sense to me at all.

“I told you, I have work to do,” I said flatly. “Work that, if I had done it last year, maybe would mean that my sister would still be here.”

“What happened to her was not your fault, Carter. You can’t keep on blaming yourself for something that couldn’t be helped. It’s just the way things go in this life sometimes.” Lisa was rambling on again, and, while I appreciated how much she attempted to help, I mentally couldn’t grasp what she was saying. What did she mean it wasn’t my fault?

I had known Taylor had Guillain-Barre syndrome, but it had been hard to come to grips with just how sick she had been. My work had taken up most of my time, and a second job to pay back college debt had robbed me of any extra hours. Taylor had been the light of my life, but something had happened and I found myself buried in different things that tore me away from her.

“I could’ve saved her,” I whispered to myself as I sank back down into my chair and buried my face in my hands.

“What are you missing?” Ian asked as he happened to be walking by, his arms crammed with different computers and dangling cords. “Carter, I told you that you needed rest—”

“I know, I know,” I sighed, hesitating as I turned my eyes up to him. “No one will believe me if I tell them, though.”

“Try me. I’m nothing short of genius, so I think we’ll see pretty eye-to-eye, pal.”

“You won’t understand. I don’t even fully understand what I’ve created, so…sheesh, I know almost for sure that I won’t be able to explain this.”

I nodded my thanks to him and began to dig through the desk drawers so jammed with papers that everything began to fall out and all over the linoleum floor.

“Darn it!” I exclaimed in dismay. “That floor is dirtier than—”

“I mopped it this morning,” came an amused voice from the doorway. Glancing up, my eyes widened as I caught sight of the janitor peering around the corner into the laboratory. “You’re welcome.”

My reputation as a germaphobe was well-known throughout the hospital, it seemed, I realized with a snort.

“There’s going to be a meeting in five minutes, just so you know,” Lisa informed me as she strode by with various notebooks under her arm. “Do you need help? What is it this time?”

“I-I’m fine,” I answered down from where I had forced myself to get down on hands and knees and look underneath my desk. “I’ll be there in a moment…okay?”

Something like worry was unmistakable on her face, but I was too preoccupied to notice much else than the dust bunnies floating across the floor underneath the desk. What was this anyways? Carlos had said the floor had just been mopped.

Nearly hitting my head on the edge of the desk, I stood back up and brushed the dust from the knees of my scrubs. My eyes scanned the whole top of my nearly pristine desk, but there was nothing other than the aqueous substances that I had been experimenting with. I glanced at the clock and saw that Lisa was right, and that I had once again forgotten one of the catch-all meetings that sometimes characterized the work day. It wasn’t that they were the most important gatherings for the lab team at the hospital, but it was a good way to check up on one another’s progress and determine whether there needed to be a group effort on a certain project.

Me? If I was to be completely honest with myself, no one was interested in curing something that didn’t seem to be an immediate threat to any of our patients. At one of the small meetings held a few months ago, I had attempted to voice my idea that a cure to Guillain-Barre syndrome might very possibly lead to a breakthrough with treating multiple sclerosis. It was a complex idea, and one that I had lost many nights’ sleep over, but I could somehow sense that I could do it. My sister’s voice was in the back of my head, her face always flashing into mind whenever I entered the hospital where she had died of cardiac arrest.

Shoving all my papers and files back into my desk and hastily trying to organize the glass bottles in the case I owned specifically for that purpose, I left the lab and began taking the steps two at a time.

“You have enough time,” Leo, one of the lab scientists, yelled up to me from where he was leisurely climbing the stairs with his nose buried in a heavy volume entitled The Path to Discovering the Right Element. The title in itself stressed me out. Most of the time, a book beginning with the word ‘path’ really meant that the author himself didn’t know the thing that people were trying to discover. The thought of mine confused many of my friends when I attempted to explain it, and at family dinners, my relatives had ceased asking my opinions on different subjects.

“Oh, I’m just doing it for the exercise,” I called back to Leo while I rounded a sharp corner and started up the next flight up to the main floor.

The meetings were always held in Mr. Trevan’s office, around the long mahogany table that he kept for the occasions. Of course, it was just a slight bit extravagant, but then he cared for his lab techs and scientists and wanted them to feel at ease during the brief breaks from being stuck in the cold lab.

“Ah, good to see you here this time,” Mr. Trevan laughed as he caught me by the arm. His eyes traveled over me in a second, and I looked away in discomfort, never quite knowing what the man was thinking. It was well-known in the lab that he oftentimes criticized and judged without much knowledge, and the very idea disturbed me.

“You too, sir.” There was still a place to be respectful, I decided.

“You look pale, Carter. Getting enough sleep?”

I shook my head, my eyes falling to the floor and studying each stubby piece of coarse gray carpet, my hands fidgeting with the hem of my lab coat. They were so used to holding something that they were at a loss of what to do, and I felt more than dumb as I dropped the edge of the coat and stuck them in my empty pockets.

“I get enough,” I responded with a slight nod.

“How was your Thanksgiving? I bet your mom tried to put some more flesh on those bones of yours,” Mr. Trevan chuckled as he ushered me to a seat beside himself and set down his mug of coffee at his place. “Must be why you didn’t eat pizza with us today, huh?”

“I was working yesterday. I had some things to finish up and decided that it was best to do it right away while the formula was still fresh in my mind,” I explained while taking the seat and folding my hands across the table. I knew I was in for the holiday spiel again, but I was too tired to feel much like debating the subject.

“Don’t you ever write down your formulae?” Mr. Trevan asked instead, surprise evident on his middle-aged face.

I shook my head vehemently, alarm leaping into my eyes.

“Sir, I never write down any of them, with no exceptions.”

“Why—why not?” His voice was incredulous.

“I know that as long as they’re in my head, they’re safe,” I said emphatically, looking my boss straight in the eyes and giving a firm nod. “I tend to overthink things, so memorization has always been my strength. In seventh grade, I had the whole periodic table of elements and their atomic masses memorized.”

While amazement registered on his face, Mr. Trevan shook his head and fingered the handle of the coffee cup with slight agitation. Everyone in the lab knew that he was a man of ultimate precision and tried whenever he could to enforce the importance of precision in the laboratory. Many times, I had tried to become more precise in my calculations on paper, but it confused me and muddled my thinking. In my mind, everything was organized in its own unique way; it was just the way I was used to solving problems. If you wrote something down, then it became definite, it seemed. I preferred not to do that until I knew that I had come to the right formula, equation, or answer.

“Alright, everyone, it is time to get things started!” he announced with energy, turning from me to the rest of the white-coated scientists gathered. “First of all, I sincerely hope that all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I myself ate too much ham, but that is beside the point. Is there anything that anyone would like to share to kick off our meeting?”

There was silence in the room as everyone looked at one another, expecting for there to be at least one person to break the awkward silence rapidly filling the room.

“Alright then,” Mr. Trevan said with a raise of his graying eyebrows. “I’m just going to assume that everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving. Moving on, then. Is there anything that anyone discovered this week that will lead to changing the pharmacological field in any aspect?”

I bit back the tears stinging at the corners of my eyes and looked down at my lap. My fingers curled into a fist, closing in on nothing when I had been convinced that this was the time that I would finally have the proof to give them. The proof to earn the attention and support to the cause so close to my heart.

“Mr. Trevan, I don’t want to give anyone too much hope, but I believe that I have come upon the cure for multiple sclerosis.”

My head shot up, and my eyes searched the room until they fell upon Lisa standing at her place at the table.

“Wow, that is certainly—something,” Mr. Trevan finally said, a deeply impressed expression on his face. “To be honest, I didn’t think this was coming so soon. Would you care to explain to us?”

Drawing out a small glass bottle from her pocket, she smiled and set it on the table beside her coffee cup.

“This compound that I have come up with simultaneously cuts down the body’s inflammations and the demyelination caused by this autoimmune disease. So many people suffer from this, and I’m done with seeing people in pain and hopeless because they know that they won’t fully ever recover.”

The room fell silent, everyone’s gazes fastened on the small bottle in visible wonder. I could feel my heart going still in my chest, the color draining from my face as I covered my head in my hands.

“Can you explain how it does that?” Mr. Trevan asked curiously while leaning forward in his chair.

Lisa drew a clipboard from among her papers on the table and turned it outward, displaying to the group a various set of chemical equations and medical explanations scribbled beside each one.

“By my calculations—”

“Those are wrong.”

“Excuse me?”

I stood up and shook my head, hands gripping the edge of the table so hard that I could feel them going white.

“That isn’t a cure for multiple sclerosis,” I stated in a voice that I couldn’t get to stop shaking. “It’s my attempt to cure Guillain-Barre syndrome which may lead to helping MS patients as well.”

“What even is Guillain-Barre syndrome?” Lisa asked with a shake of her head and a look of perplexity. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“That—right there,” I said, still blinking back tears, “is my first actual step to curing the disease that took my sister from me three months ago. It was right here in this hospital that she died of cardiac arrest in the ER waiting room, waiting for someone to help her.”

“You can’t blame our ER staff for her death,” Mr. Trevan said with a shake of his head.

“I’m not,” I replied. “I’m blaming myself for not having found this earlier than I did. It was my fault for not taking her condition seriously…none of us had heard of it. But now I know, and I want to let everyone else know about it and how much it can do to someone’s life.”

“You are losing it, Carter,” shot back Lisa. “I know that losing someone that close to you is hard, but you’re taking this to the next level. This is my cure for MS.”

“Go ahead and see if it will work. I promise you, Mr. Trevan…I discovered this.”

“You have no proof, Carter,” Mr. Trevan sighed. “You never write anything down, which, I believe you said so yourself.”

“Do a chemical analysis of the compound, don’t show her the results, and ask her to replicate it,” I told him.

“This is the chemical analysis right here,” Lisa said impatiently, handing her clipboard across the table to Mr. Trevan.

“Ask her to replicate it,” I repeated intently.

“This is ridiculous,” stated Mr. Trevan in bewilderment.

It was five days later when the whole laboratory staff realized that I was correct and Lisa lying. I don’t deny that it was nerve-wracking and painful to watch her each day, putting the chemicals together and synthesizing them with an expertise I didn’t have.

Yet there was a specific way I had done each step in the process that I don’t think anyone would have ever guessed. Maybe it was my way of thinking, but I didn’t know for sure. All I knew was that my compound was being tested on various patients and that it would possibly require more work; but I was content.