Dr Lions' Den

“My dear, I think it is a wise decision to opt for palliative care,” said Dr van Allen. “Unless ….”

     “Unless what?” Tess demanded, her tone far more peremptory than she had meant it to be. Before going to see Dr Van Allen, she had been entirely firm in her mind. She was not remotely interested in any of those medical breakthroughs that only meant another couple of months with ever more toxic and debilitating doses of chemotherapy. She’d had enough. She wasn’t exactly resigned to it, but could go for hours, sometimes even days, without those surges of panic and resentment that were more toxic than any chemotherapy. And yet that one mundane little word unless had shot through her like a thunderbolt. Don’t expect me to make decisions like that, she thought, it’s not fair. I thought we understood each other better than that!

     “I have a colleague – more a friend, I suppose, as we don’t work in the same discipline. Dr Ernest Lions. He is – well, a little eccentric.”

     The old cliché about pots and kettles occurred to Tess. Dr van Allen was the kindest of men, and an expert in his field, but he was borderline bizarre in some ways. He had a fully functioning model trainset in his consulting room, and never pretended it was just to put his younger patients at ease. He was prone to suddenly bursting into bits of Wagner or Mozart in a baritone voice that held more enthusiasm than artistry. He once, and Tess had never fathomed out why, cut off just half of his luxuriant beard for a while. If he described someone as eccentric – well, he was either immune to the irony of it (which Tess somehow doubted) or it meant that the other person raised eccentricity to a perturbing degree.

     “He isn’t a medical doctor, to start with. Now hear me out, Tess! He’s a doctor of physics and brilliant in his field.”

     Tess didn’t doubt it, but wasn’t sure if she wanted to hand over her care to someone who fancied himself a cross between Albert Einstein and Sheldon Cooper. 

     “It’s entirely up to you, of course.”

     “I’ll see him,” Tess decided. Well, what did she have to lose? Not that she had anything to gain, either, she hurriedly reminded herself.

     So Dr van Allen rang up Dr Lions and arranged an appointment for Tess to see him in his study at the University. That very afternoon!

     She didn’t quite know if she were relieved or a tad disappointed when she saw that Dr Lions didn’t look especially eccentric. He was just a man probably in his late forties, of medium height, dark hair already thinning a little, features a little sharp, but a warm enough smile and wearing a smart pair of grey trousers and a pale blue shirt, topped with a V-necked sweater that she wondered if an elderly relative had knitted for him. 

     They exchanged a few pleasantries, then he said, “Tess, I appreciate that you’ve at least come and will hear me out. I know it’s bad manners to talk about people behind their backs, but Tom van Allen and I have been talking about you and decided that if you agree, you will be an ideal candidate. You’re still relatively young,” (in other words, about the same age as you, thought Tess, catching at that word relative). “I know it sounds an incredibly insensitive thing to say, but apart from the cancer you’re in good health. And –“ he paused, as if knowing this was the trickiest thing to say, “Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe you have no – great attachments.”

     Well, that was one way of putting it. But there was more than a degree of truth in it. She didn’t have a significant other, and her parents were dead. She got on quite well with her much younger brother, and thought her two nieces were sweet, but they lived over two hundred miles away, and she didn’t really have much to do with them. She enjoyed her work at the local library, and was on good terms with her colleagues, but didn’t have a best friend. “In other words, you think I’m a Jilly no Mates,” she said.

     “I said nothing of the sort. I’m in pretty much the same position myself, though Tom humours me and has a certain respect for my intellect. You will think that what I am going to say now is quite, quite mad, and may well leave my study and even report me to the authorities.”

     “Well, just spit it out and let’s see!” she said, beginning to lose patience. After all, wasn’t one of the “perks” of being terminally ill supposed to be your right to absolute frankness.

     “I can’t cure your cancer, and so far as I know, there is no doctor, medical or otherwise, in this world, who can. Despite all the progress and all the feelgood stories, there are still some cancers that can’t be cured. Not yet. But I am pretty sure like most people are, that a time will come when they can be.”

     Well, that’s all very interesting, thought Tess, but he’s hardly going to offer me the services of a time machine.

     “I believe I may have developed a time machine,” said Dr Lions. “It was not nearly as difficult as I thought once I had made the important breakthrough. Will you at least see a demonstration?”

     “Why not?” asked Tess, wondering if perhaps the drugs she was taking had started giving her hallucinations, for all they hadn’t until now.

     “This is a much scaled down version.” He took out something that looked absurdly like a rectangular Pyrex dish, except on the sides, there were various wires and lights. She noticed that he put on surgical gloves to handle it, but as if reading her mind, he said, “It would do me no harm to touch it, though it is a little hot, but I want to keep it sterile. Now observe.” He took a mouse out of a little cage in his study, put the mouse inside the receptacle, put the lid down, and switched on the mechanism. It throbbed softly for a couple of seconds, the lights flashed in some kind of rhythmic sequence, and that was that. He took the lid off, and it was empty. “Well okay,” said Tess, trying to get her head round it, “But how do I know you haven’t just vaporised that unfortunate mouse? Or done some kind of conjuring trick?” She felt decidedly squeamish about the mouse, though she wasn’t totally opposed to animal testing or the like.

     “You don’t,” he said, frankly. “And I’ve seen far more impressive conjuring tricks. You have to take me on trust.”

     “That’s one heck of a lot of trust!”

     “Think it over for a little while, Tess.” It was a bland enough statement, but she knew that a little while had a special meaning for someone in her position.

     “What’s the worst case scenario?” she asked.

     “That it doesn’t work. Or that progress isn’t made as quickly as we hope.”

     “Dr Lions – would you do it in my position?” I am talking as if this is something that makes sense, she thought, as if it is a reasonable discussion and not some mad scientist’s self-aggrandising folly. 

     “I don’t know,” he said, frankly. “I have never been in your position.”

     She walked home, instead of getting a cab as she had planned, walked out of the university, and along a tree lined road, and was suddenly acutely aware of every leaf on every tree, and of every shaded nuance of every cloud, and of the birdsong that came to her ears when there was a lull of the traffic. But by the time she got home she was bone-weary, and though she never, how could she, forgot how ill she was, there were spells when it did not throb to her every pulse beat and dominate her every thought, and make her every breath laboured. Those times were becoming rarer. Only last week, I doubt that walk would have tired me out, she thought. I am being prescribed high strength opioids without anyone giving me the lecture about the risks of addiction or abuse, because it doesn’t matter any more. They can carry on using the phrase about living with cancer all they like, but they know and I know that I am dying of it.

     The next morning she told Dr Lions that she was willing to try his idea. “I still think it’s probably just nonsense,” she said, “and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”

     “It doesn’t matter, Tess,” he said, “This isn’t one of those things that you have to believe in to make it happen.”

     “Well, put me in the Pyrex, then!” she said, hoping it came out as gallows humour and not near hysteria. 

     Dr Lions at least acted as if he thought it was the former. “I will give you an anaesthetic, first.” She didn’t suppose he was a qualified anaesthetist, and supposed that she was pumped so full of drugs there could be the risk of inter-action, but by now everything seemed so surreal it didn’t matter in the slightest. 

     He injected her in the arm – expertly, she had to admit, in the few seconds of consciousness before it had effect. 

     She woke up in a pleasant room, furnished in pastel shades. It dawned on her that it was winter – light snow was falling outside, and it had been summer when she was in Dr Lions’ study, but otherwise there was nothing especially out of the ordinary. And she felt well. She felt well. It was not the intermittent masking of her symptoms. It was how she felt before. There was a wall mirror in the room, and she looked at herself. She had rosy cheeks and glowing eyes and her hair was thick and shiny. Her clothes didn’t look particularly outlandish. It couldn’t be that far in the future! There was a knock at the door. Even in the most bizarre of circumstances, we follow our habits and act as if things are normal, and she called, “Come in!”

     The woman who entered was smiling and pretty, and wore a bright turquoise sweater and maroon trousers under her lab coat. Not a combination I’d have chosen, but it works, thought Tess. Then she thought why is she wearing a lab coat. But it wasn’t a matter of any great significance. 

     “Well, Tess, do you have any questions?” she asked. Tess noticed that she was wearing one of those watches that connected to the internet, and though she was no technical expert, she knew it was far more advanced than any she had seen before. Yes, she did have a question, and had suddenly realised just how hungry she was. How wonderful it is to be hungry again, she thought, not to have to force food down, and have no appetite. “Please may I have something to eat?” she asked. “Just toast or something – nothing fancy.” She had a sudden craving for thick, lavishly buttered toast, spread with the fruity tang of jam. 

     “Now, Tess, you know that’s not possible today,” the other woman said, in a quiet and reasonable voice. 

     “I don’t know any such thing!” She objected.

     The other woman acted as if she had not said a word. “Come along now. I can’t tell you how privileged we are to be working with one of the subjects of Dr Lions’ experiments. Such a great chance for us.”

     They walked down a narrow, long corridor, made less claustrophobic by big windows alongside it, looking out onto grounds that Tess half thought she recognised as the grounds of the university, though she was sure that corridor hadn’t been there before. There was a digital clock on the wall, and she saw that the time was nine in the morning, the date was the twelfth of January, and the year was 2045. 25 years, then, she thought. Most things seemed reassuringly familiar. Well, that wasn’t so surprising. Back in 2020 1995 had hardly seemed like an alien world. Dr Lions could easily still be alive! If he was, she supposed she would go to see him and thank him.

     “Your cancer has been completely cured, of course,” the woman said, “A relatively simple procedure. But it has also given us this chance. It won’t be at all painful, Tess, you have no need to worry.”

     It only seemed like a few brief minutes ago that she had last been given an injection in her arm, and this one, too, was given expertly. And as she drifted out of consciousness she caught snatches of conversation.

     “A rare chance to harvest body cells.”

     “Even her blood will be interesting.”

     “And a chance to perform an autopsy on organs that have survived cancer.”