Life Blood Part 17

"Do you want to leave the doctor a message?" a southern-sounding voice enquired.

Without thinking, I heard myself declaring, "No, this is an emergency."

What am I saying? I asked myself. But before I could take it back, Hannah was on the line.

I know how intruded on I feel when an actor calls me at home on Sunday to b.i.t.c.h. Better make this good, I told myself.

"I was at an infertility clinic yesterday and pa.s.sed out," I began.

"And now I have some herbs to take, but I'm . . . well, I'm not sure about them."

"What 'clinic'?" she asked. There was no reprimand for calling her on Sunday morning.

When I told her about Alex G.o.ddard, she said little, but she did not sound impressed. Looming there between us like the dead elephant on the living room floor was the fact that she'd specifically warned me not to go near him. And after what had just happened, there was a good case she might be right.

"Can I buy you brunch?" I finally asked, hoping to lure her back onto my case. "I'd really like to show you these herbs he gave me and get your opinion."

"I was just headed out to Zabar's to get something," she said, somewhat icily. Well, I suppose she thought she had good reason. "I'll get some bagels and meet you at my office."

Sunday traffic on upper Broadway was light, and I lucked out and found a parking s.p.a.ce roughly two blocks from her building. It was one of the low-overhead "professional" types with a single small elevator and no doorman. When I got there, the lobby was empty.

Her suite was on the third floor, and I rang the bell before I realized the door was open. She was back in her office, behind the reception area, taking off her coat, when I marched in.

While she was unwrapping her sesame bagels, smoked sturgeon, and cream cheese with chives, she got an earful. My feeling was I'd better talk fast, and I did. I told her everything I could think of about what had happened to me at Quetzal Manor. I didn't expect her to make sense of it from my secondhand account, but I wanted to set the background for my next move.

"When I was leaving, his a.s.sistant gave me these two bottles of gel-caps. She said they're special herbal extracts he makes from plants in the rain forest. Do you think I ought to take them?"

I suspected I already knew the answer. Given her previously voiced views on Alex G.o.ddard, I doubted she would endorse any potions he might dispense. But plant medicine has a long history. At least she might know if they presented any real danger.

She was schmearing cream cheese on the bagels, but she put down the plastic knife, took the two bottles, and examined them skeptically.

"These are not 'herbal extracts,' " she declared giving her first a.n.a.lysis before even opening them. "They're both manufactured drugs.

The gel-caps have names on them. It's a Latin American pharmaceutical company."

Then she opened the first bottle, took out one of the caps, crushed it between her fingers, and sniffed.

"Uh-huh, just what I thought." Then she touched a pinch of the white powder to her tongue. "Right." She made a face and wiped her tongue with a tissue. "Except it's much stronger than the usual version. I can tell you right now that this drug, in this potency, is illegal in the U.S."

What was it? I wondered. Cocaine? And how could she tell its potency with just a taste? Then I reminded myself why I'd come to her in the first place: She'd been around the track many, many times.

"It's gonadotropin," she said glaring at me. Like, you d.a.m.ned fool.

"I'm virtually certain. The trade name here in the U.S. is Pergonal, though that's not what this is. This is a much stronger concoction, and I can see some impurities." She settled the bottle onto her desk with what seemed almost a shudder. "This is the pharmaceutical equivalent of hundred-and-ninety-proof moons.h.i.+ne."

"What is it? What's it supposed it do?" Jesus, I thought, what's he giving me?

"It's a hormone extracted from the urine of menopausal women. It triggers a greater than normal egg production and release. It's sometimes prescribed together with Lup.r.o.n, which causes your body to release a similar hormone. Look, if you want to try Pergonal, the real version, I'll write you a prescription, though I honestly don't think it's going to do you the slightest bit of good."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I'd almost been considering giving Alex G.o.ddard the benefit of the doubt, at least till I found out more about him, and now he hands me this.

Now we both were looking at the other bottle.

"What do you think that is?" I asked, pointing.

She broke the plastic seal, opened it, and looked in. It too was a white powder sealed in gel-caps, and she gave one a sniff, then the taste test.

"I have no idea."

She set the bottle back on her desk, and I stared at it, terrified of what it might be. Finally I got up my courage and reached for it. A white sticker had been wrapped around it, with directions for taking .

. . whatever it was . . . written on it. Then I happened to notice that one corner showed the edge of another label, one beneath the hand-applied first one. I lifted a letter opener off her desk and managed to get it under the outer label. With a little sc.r.a.ping and tugging, I got it off.

"Does this mean anything to you?" I asked her, handing it back. "It's in Spanish, but the contents seem to be HMG Ma.s.sone."

"I don't believe it," she said, taking the bottle as though lifting a cobra. I even got the distinct feeling she didn't want to leave any fingerprints on it. "That's an even more powerful drug to stimulate ovarian follicles and induce superovulation. It's highly illegal in this country. Anybody who gives these drugs in combination to a patient is flirting with an ethics charge, or worse."

I think I gasped. What was he trying to put into my body?

She settled the bottle back on the desk, her eyes growing narrow.

"Since you say his 'nurse' or a.s.sistant or whatever she was gave you this, I suppose there's always the chance she made an innocent mistake.

But still, what's he doing with this stuff at all? They manufacture it down in Mexico, and also, I've heard, somewhere in Central America, but it's not approved in the U.S. Anybody who dispenses this to a patient is putting their license at risk." She paused to give me one of those looks. "a.s.suming Alex G.o.ddard even has a medical license. These 'alternative medicine' types sometimes claim they answer to a higher power, they're board-certified by G.o.d."

"I don't for a minute think it was an 'innocent mistake.' " I was beginning to feel terribly betrayed and violated. I also was getting mad as h.e.l.l, my fingertips tingling. "But why would he give me these drugs at all? Did he somehow--?"

"I think you'd better ask him," she said pa.s.sing me a bagel piled high with cream cheese and sturgeon.

She bit into her own bagel and for a while we both just chewed in silence. I, however, had just lost all my appet.i.te. Alex G.o.ddard who might well be my last chance for a baby, had just dispensed ma.s.sive doses of illegal drugs to me. Which, my longtime ob/gyn was warning me, were both unnecessary and unethical.

"What do you think I should do?" I asked finally, breaking the silence but barely able to get my voice out.

She didn't say anything. She'd finished her bagel, and now she'd begun wrapping up the container of cream cheese, folding the wax paper back over the remaining sturgeon. I thought her silent treatment was her way of telling me my brunch consultation was over. She clearly was exasperated with me.

"Let me tell you a story," she said finally, as she carefully began putting the leftover sturgeon back into the Zabar's bag. "When I was eight years old all the Jews in our Polish ghetto were starving because the n.a.z.is refused to give us food stamps. So my father bribed a n.a.z.i officer to let him go out into the countryside to try to buy some eggs and flour, anything, just so we could eat. The farmer came that Sat.u.r.day morning in a horse-drawn wagon to pick up my father. At the last minute, I asked to go with him and he let me. That night the n.a.z.is liquidated our entire ghetto, almost five thousand people. No one else in my family survived. Not my mother, not my two sisters, not anyone."

Her voice had become totally dispa.s.sionate, matter-of-fact, as though repression of the horror was the only way a sane person could deal with it. She could just as easily have been describing a country outing as she continued. I did notice, however, that her East European accent had suddenly become very prominent, as though she was returning there in her thoughts.

"When we learned what had happened, my father asked the farmer we were visiting to go to a certain rural doctor we knew and beg him to give us some poison, so we could commit suicide before the n.a.z.is got us too.

The doctor, however, told him he had only enough poison for his own family. He did, however, give him a prescription for us. But when my father begged that farmer to go to a pharmacy and get the poison, he and his entire family refused. Instead, they hid us in their barn for over a year, even though they knew it meant a firing squad if the n.a.z.is found us." She glared at me. "Do you understand what I'm saying? They told us that if we wanted to do something foolish because we were desperate, we would have to do it without their help."

It was the first time I ever knew her real story. I was stunned.

"What, exactly, are you driving at?" I think I already knew. The long, trusting relations.h.i.+p we'd shared was now teetering on the brink. By going to see Alex G.o.ddard--even if it was partly a research trip to check him out--I had disappointed her terribly. She'd lost respect for me. She thought I was desperate and about to embark on something foolish.

"I'm saying do whatever you want." She got up and lifted her coat off the corner rack. "But get those drugs out of here. I don't want them anywhere near this office. I tried everything legal there was to get you pregnant. If that wasn't good enough for you and now you want to go to some quack, that's your affair. Let me just warn you that combining gonadotropin and HMG Ma.s.sone at these dosages is like putting your ovaries on steroids; you get ma.s.sive egg production for a couple of cycles, but the long-term damage could be severe. I strongly advise you against it, but if you insist and then start having complications, I would appreciate not being involved."

Translation: If you start fooling around with Alex G.o.ddard, don't ever come back.

It felt like a dagger in my chest. What was I going to do? One thought: Okay, so these drugs aren't the way, but you couldn't help me get pregnant. All I did was spend twenty thousand dollars on futile procedures. Not to mention the heartbreak.

"You know," I said finally, maybe a little sharply, "I think we ought to be working together, not at cross-purposes."