Death by Your Own Device: A Philip Sarkis Mystery

By Peter Kowey MD

Ray Gilbert isn’t someone you would call a “nice guy,” but he is a hard-working cardiologist who gives a damn about his job. When Ray starts seeing patients who received medical devices they might not need, he tries to figure out why.

Spurned by his superiors and professional societies, Ray turns to Tiffany Springer, an eager but naive newspaper reporter—and Ray’s new lover—to tell his story. Her articles gain national acclaim. Ray and Tiffany ride the crest of their success … until they came to an untimely end with drug overdose as the probable cause of death.

What really happened to Tiffany and Ray, and do their deaths have something to do with the unnecessary medical devices? As Ray’s mentor, Dr. Philip Sarkis can’t help but question the reports. His suspicions lead him to seek the help of his partner and a private investigator. However, as previously proven, digging into medicine’s big money is a deadly business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781532093821

Peter Kowey MD

Dr. Peter Kowey is the Emeritus Chief of Cardiology at the Main Line Health System and the William Wikoff Chair in Cardiovascular Research at the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research. He and his wife live in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and have three daughters and six grandchildren. This is the fifth novel in the Philip Sarkis Mystery series.

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Copyright © 2020 Peter Kowey, MD.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Death By Your Own Device: A Philip Sarkis Mystery is fiction, but, as with the previous novels in my series, based on real events. I have chosen to use the names of some real places and institutions to enrich the narrative, but none of them were involved in this story. As with my first four novels, there are several people who inspired the actors in this book. However, all of the characters in all of my novels are fictional. Any resemblance to real people, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-9383-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-9382-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020903426

iUniverse rev. date: 02/24/2020

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Epilogue

To my mother, Edith

She couldn’t know how much she inspired me to tell stories as well as she did while I sat on her knee.

To my father, Pete, who did nothing more than support our entire family with all of his might

To our children, Olivia, Jaime, and Susan and our sons-in-law, Mark and Sean

Ours is a modern family, but Dorothy and I couldn’t love and respect all of you more. And our special thanks for the six wonderful souls you have produced and upon whom we dote relentlessly.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank James Kaufmann, PhD, my best friend from high school, for his terrific help with whipping all of my books into shape. Kauf is an esteemed and now-retired medical writer in Minnesota, who not only helped me keep my grammar straight but also helped to improve the story’s consistency. Without Kauf, none of my books would have been good enough to publish.

I am deeply indebted to Steve Crane, the owner of Pavilion Press and the publisher of my first four books. Steve gave me my first break for which I will be forever grateful.

Donna Simonds and Roe Wells, my long-term administrative assistants, have provided logistical support, making available books for signings and other appearances and to everyone and anyone who asked, and keeping my bewildering schedule straight.

Finally, Dorothy, my wife and soul mate. She was the first to suggest that instead of being angry about things I couldn’t change, to use my right brain to pursue my dream of telling stories.

1

CHAPTER

H e had finally fallen asleep in the on-call room when his beeper restarted its infernal chirping. He had lost track of how often his pager had gone off on this busy night. The frequency and the urgency of the calls might be atypical for the other cardiology fellows but not for Marwan. They didn’t call him Black Cloud Baschri for nothing. It seemed to Marwan—and his peers—that he got hammered with emergencies just about every time he was on call for the NorthBroad University cardiology service, and that night was no exception.

The evening had started out reasonably placidly. Marwan arrived home to his sparsely furnished bachelor apartment on Twelfth Street around 7:00 p.m. and had concocted some sort of dinner sandwich from the contents of a nearly empty refrigerator. The cheese had a little mold that he dissected with his customary surgical precision, and it sat reasonably well, along with a few slices of turkey breast, on stale rye bread he had bought the previous weekend at a corner deli up the street. A little mustard and a pickle, and Marwan was satisfied. A lot better than his relatives in Iraq would be able to find.

As expected, his meal was interrupted by a couple of calls from nervous residents and medical students whom he quickly discharged with reasonably good humor. Although Marwan was generally known as a good guy, residents knew he could be grumpy on the phone. But it was August, and that meant green interns on service who were taking on their first real clinical responsibilities. And since patients with heart problems frightened them more than anything in medicine, Marwan expected to do a lot of hand-holding until they got their sea legs. Better to answer their questions on the phone now than to have to go in later and pull their balls (and their patients’) out of the fire.

Marwan began to relax as only he could, pulling out his laptop and working on his latest cardiology research project. He had arrived in the US with his parents as a child refugee and had worked his way through college, medical school, and then the hopelessly steep internal-medicine residency training pyramid. Not only had he established himself as a competent clinician, but he had published half a dozen papers in high-profile medical journals. His research was the primary reason he had been able to escape low-level training programs to arrive at one of the better academic cardiology fellowship programs in the country.

His latest project had to do with racial and gender bias in clinical trial enrollment, a topic Marwan understood well, having experienced bigotry firsthand during his early days of training. His mentor promised him that if he did a good job, the manuscript might be published in a journal like JAMA, which favored papers with a political bent, and that it would attract wide media attention once in print. All the work had been worth it, Marwan admitted to himself. He was where he wanted to be, on track to be a hot-shot academic cardiologist, just like his parents had dreamed.

Marwan fell to his work and lost track of time. He was still awake at midnight when a fresh heart attack patient hit the NorthBroad ER. He activated the catheterization lab team from home and then took a short ride to the hospital in his beat-up Subaru wagon to meet Tim Weiss, the interventional cardiology attending on call, in the emergency room.

Marwan and Tim took the patient straight to the cath lab, where they placed a balloon catheter and stent in the patient’s occluded coronary artery to open the blockage responsible for the heart damage. Despite the lateness of the hour and the severe thunderstorms that were crossing the area in bands, the cath lab team had been assembled and the procedure performed so quickly that only a very small portion of the patient’s heart muscle had died. By 4:00 a.m., the patient was in a bed on the cardiology floor, surrounded by his grateful family, who could do nothing but thank Marwan and Tim for their outstanding work. Marwan beamed. This was the reason he had wanted to be a doctor. What else in life could give anyone so much satisfaction?

So now what? Marwan thought as he walked down the deserted hospital corridor toward the elevator. Push the down button and go home, or push the up button and sleep in one of the on-call rooms provided by the hospital. Not an easy a decision. The drive home would be through pouring rain, and upstairs, in the on-call room, there would be at least three other people snoring away. But rounds started early in the cardiac ICU, and even if he couldn’t sleep up there, he could at least get a shower and clean scrubs. And so Marwan went to the sleeping room and stretched on a board-like bed, struggling to get a couple of hours’ rest, until another call roused him yet again.

Marwan stumbled out into the lighted hallway and was surprised to see that his beeper screen indicated the call was from an exchange he recognized as the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania. He knew it was upstate because he had a few friends from Iraq who had taken jobs there, and he had their numbers in his contact directory. He pulled out his cell and called the number and was greeted by a woman’s voice.

Hello, who is this? she asked.

Dr. Marwan Baschri, senior cardiology fellow at NorthBroad. I believe you called our answering service?

Yes, this is Liz Gold. I’m a nurse practitioner at Allentown. Dr. Ray Gilbert, one of our electrophysiologists, would like to speak to you, please. Can you hold while I get him on the phone?

Sure, Marwan answered sleepily. Although the name wasn’t familiar, Marwan had been carefully schooled to be especially polite and to quickly accept calls from doctors who might have patients to refer to NorthBroad. Referrals were the lifeblood of a great cardiology program, and Marwan wanted people to know he had trained at a premier place.

Liz put the phone down, and Marwan could hear her walk away and then quickly back again, repeating Marwan’s name as Gilbert came on the line.

Hi, Marwan, this is Ray Gilbert up in Allentown. You’re on call for the NorthBroad cardiology group?

Yes, Dr. Gilbert. What can I do for you?

We need your help with a patient who was transferred to our hospital last evening with frequent shocks from his ICD.

Marwan snapped to full wakefulness. ICDs, or implantable defibrillators, were designed to save lives by shocking the heart internally when they detected an abnormal and serious heart rhythm, and they usually were highly effective. However, patients who had these devices occasionally developed such frequent episodes of arrhythmia that the devices could begin to deliver shocks too frequently or even incessantly. In even worse cases, the device could begin to sense a fast but normal heart rhythm and falsely shock the patient. Either way, it was bad news. The shocks caused enormous discomfort to the patient, kind of like being kicked in the middle of the chest by a mule. In addition, frequent device shocks could weaken the heart and cause heart failure or even kill the patient it was supposed to be protecting. As such, this was one of the most serious emergencies in medicine and required prompt and expert treatment, starting with potent drugs designed to quell the cardiac arrhythmias.

Marwan’s first question, as he pulled out his trusty notebook: What antiarrhythmic drugs has the patient received, Dr. Gilbert?

I started him on intravenous amiodarone, Gilbert answered, but the damn arrhythmia just got worse and more frequent. I added lidocaine and a beta-blocker, but now he’s having it every few minutes.

Marwan asked the next obvious question. Is the device still activated?

I tried to turn it off, but the ventricular tachycardia wouldn’t stop, so I had to turn it on to shock him back into normal rhythm, which seems to last for a few minutes before the damn arrhythmia starts again. I don’t have any other drugs to offer him, and we don’t do VT ablations up here, so I need to get him down to your place as soon as possible.

Marwan didn’t have the expertise to get into a detailed discussion of the case with this doctor. And besides, his job was to take the message and call the attending cardiologist on call to see how he or she wanted to proceed.

Got it, Dr. Gilbert. I just need a few more things before I call my attending and get the ball rolling. What’s the patient’s name, age, and diagnosis?

His name is Nolan Perini, and he’s seventy-three. He has a non-ischemic cardiomyopathy and had his ICD put in only two or three months ago for primary prevention. He hadn’t used his device until last night, when he went into electrical storm.

Marwan processed all of that to mean that the patient had a weakened heart muscle not caused by a coronary artery problem and that the defibrillator had been placed to prevent sudden death in this person, who was at high risk because of his heart disease. Perini hadn’t had any arrhythmias previously but now was apparently having them incessantly.

So is it OK for us to arrange the helicopter transfer? Gilbert asked impatiently.

I’ll call the attending on duty for electrophysiology. Once I have his or her permission to accept your patient, I’ll get him an ICU bed.

He’s going to need more than that. Somebody has to see him with me when we get there to figure out how to keep him alive.

You’re coming with the patient? Marwan asked. This was highly unusual.

You betcha. A nurse and I will be on the helicopter to deal with his arrhythmias. If I don’t go, I’m pretty sure you’ll be unloading a corpse. Who’s the attending on duty?

Hold on a minute, Marwan answered. He sprinted back into the on-call room, flicking on the light, eliciting groans from the three house officers who were awakened by the noise and the light. Marwan looked at the on-call roster tacked to the bulletin board, flicked off the light, and ran back to the phone.

Dr. Sarkis is the attending on duty.

Really? Gilbert said. Philip Sarkis?

That’s right.

Wow, I didn’t know he was at NorthBroad.

He’s been here a few years, I think.

I trained under him at Gladwyne Memorial, a few years ago. I thought he was living in the Poconos somewhere and was out of academic medicine.

I can’t help you there, Dr. Gilbert. I’m sure he’ll fill you in when you get here. Let me call him and get things in motion, Marwan said, yanking Gilbert back to the case at hand.

Right. Yes. Call me at this number as soon as you have things arranged. Our helicopter is available so we can be down there within an hour.

Armed with most of the information he needed, Marwan promised to call back in a few minutes, hung up, and immediately asked the answering service operator to call Dr. Sarkis at home, where he probably was soundly asleep.

Which he was trying to be. The problem was that the Sarkis-Deaver family bed was overpopulated. Philip and Dorothy shared space, as usual, with two fairly large dogs, out cold in their customary position at the foot of the bed. In addition, Erin, their three-year-old, had had another nightmare and had come into their room shortly after midnight. She was now sleeping soundly between Philip and Dorothy. Erin, at best a fitful sleeper, had somehow turned herself horizontal, feet on Philip’s pillow, head on Dorothy’s. Neither even thought about moving their angel for fear of awakening her and eliciting more details about the bad dreams that seemed to occur almost every night. The pediatric psychologist they consulted believed the bad dreams were a by-product of Erin’s losing her mother and the rocky adoption process that had finally placed her and her five-year-old sister, Emily, in the warm and loving hands of Philip and Dorothy. "She will get better; just be patient and keep loving her, and she’ll be fine," he had counseled.

Now, several months and dozens of difficult nights later, Philip and Dorothy weren’t so sure. They contemplated getting another opinion, although they had to admit that Erin’s daytime life was pretty darn normal, and she seemed like a happy kid most of the time. Her sister Emily’s nightmares had finally dissipated, and she now slept soundly every night. Philip and Dorothy were relieved that both the girls had adapted to their new life about as well as they could have hoped.

Philip kept his cell phone on the bedside table when he was on call and had it set loudly so he couldn’t ignore it. Marwan’s call startled him, the noise almost causing him to fall to the floor from his precarious perch on the edge of the bed. Once upright, Philip grabbed the squawking device and tried to silence it quickly before it awakened his crew. He needn’t have worried. He looked over his shoulder as he walked out of the bedroom to converse with whoever was bothering him and saw that none of his bed companions had stirred an inch.

This is Philip Sarkis. Who’s calling? he asked impatiently.

Dr. Sarkis, this is Marwan Baschri, the cardiology fellow on call.

Hi, Marwan. What can I do for you? Philip asked, now trying to be as cordial as he could. Philip remembered what it had been like to be on the front lines and how difficult and daunting it was to disturb an attending physician in the middle of the night.

I think we have a hot one for you, Dr. Sarkis. Marwan went on to describe the clinical situation and the patient who was in trouble at Allentown Hospital, trying to be as complete as possible without losing the forest for the trees and holding up the transfer. He depended on Sarkis to ask clarifying questions, which came fast.

So we don’t have any idea why this fairly healthy man suddenly decided to shock his brains out?

I haven’t seen any of his records yet. I’m sure they’ll be coming on the helicopter with him, along with his cardiologist.

He’s flying with the patient to our place?

As soon as I give them the word. I told the doc there that I would call him back after I spoke with you. I expect it will be an interesting trip.

Why?

The patient is having a lot of arrhythmia, and the weather is terrible.

Philip hadn’t heard the rain and thunder because they had begun to use a white noise machine outside the bedrooms to help Erin sleep through the night. Like other potential remedies, that one had made little difference in her sleep patterns.

What’s the name of the doctor coming with Mr. Perini?

Ray Gilbert. He said he knows you.

Yes. He trained with us years ago. Good guy and pretty smart, overall. If he couldn’t figure this one out, then we probably do have a major problem on our hands.

So I can tell him to bring the patient down?

Yes, but if he’s already on a lot of drugs and breaking through, we’re going to have to alert the electrophysiology lab team to set up to do an ablation procedure.

Marwan agreed, but the prospect made his palms moist. What Philip had referred to was a hopelessly complicated and dangerous procedure in which electrical catheters would be inserted into the bottom chambers of the patient’s heart to map the part from which the nasty arrhythmias were originating. Once identified, those same catheters would be hooked up to a radiofrequency generator to heat their tips to effectively cauterize the abnormal tissue. This was one of the most daunting procedures in all of medicine in the best of circumstances. Bringing an unstable patient to the lab for an ablation, off hours, was really scary business that Marwan had successfully avoided so far in his training career.

Do you want me to call in anyone to help out with the procedure, like one of the electrophysiology fellows? Marwan asked, hoping to dump the case onto one of his senior colleagues.

Nah, we can handle it, Marwan. Just tell them to get the patient down to our place as quickly as possible. Tell them to bypass the ER after they land and go directly to the EP lab. I’ll meet you and the staff there inside an hour. I just need to get dressed and drive in. At least there won’t be any traffic.

OK, Dr. Sarkis. Drive carefully; the weather is terrible, Marwan said as he hung up. He promptly dialed Gilbert, who answered Marwan’s return call himself and was happy to get the green light.

We’ll meet you in the EP lab, Dr. Gilbert, Marwan said. Dr. Sarkis has asked me to assemble the staff so we can start the ablation case as soon as you get here.

Excellent, Marwan. Thanks for all your help. I look forward to meeting you very soon.

Marwan spent the next several minutes activating beepers for the EP lab staff on call, taking their calls and informing them of the task at hand.

A little like assembling a strike force, Marwan mumbled to himself as he took a few minutes for the luxury of a wake-up shower before the onslaught. I wanted a fellowship experience with a lot of action and sick patients to care for, he thought as he strained to dry himself with one of the miniature towels that the hospital deigned to make available for the house staff. I guess that saying is correct: be careful what you wish for.

2

CHAPTER

W hile Marwan showered, Dorothy slept, and Philip dressed, Ray Gilbert was scrambling to prepare himself and his patient for the short but exciting ride to NorthBroad. Unlike some large university hospitals, Allentown General couldn’t afford its own helicopter, so the hospital had arranged with a local airport to have a chopper and crew available on short notice. It was important to have this capability, even though they didn’t use it very often. It was a way of reaching out to their northern neighbors and attracting the referral business that had become so important to their bottom line. They knew that most of their feeder hospitals were able to stabilize almost all of their patients and ship them to Allentown General by ambulance, but the availability of air transport—at Allentown’s expense, of course—made the hospitals and doctors in the hinterlands feel secure and confident that their southern neighbor was there when they needed help in a hurry.

Given the cost involved, physicians weren’t permitted to order air transport without the authorization of the hospital administrator. So Gilbert had spent the last twenty minutes identifying which of the dozens of hospitals administrators’ turn it was to take the call. The person this particular evening had a day job running cafeteria services. Getting her on the phone and then convincing her that there was no other way to save the patient’s life was pure torture.

Dr. Gilbert, can you tell me why we can’t just send the patient to NorthBroad by ambulance? the administrator asked.

We don’t have time for that, Ms. Savitz, Gilbert said, trying to remain civil. The patient is very sick and might die on the way.

And do you know if the patient’s insurance will pay for the transfer? It’s very expensive, you know.

I have absolutely no idea, and I don’t have time to check. We have to leave now. The helicopter is landing on our pad as we speak.

Dr. Gilbert, you should have cleared this with me before you called for the helicopter.

I was trying to save time and a life, Ms. Savitz.

I’m going to have to call the hospital president and get back to you, Dr. Gilbert.

Fine; you do that, Ms. Savitz. We’ll wait.

Gilbert hung up and immediately went to the unit where Mr. Perini had already been transferred to a stretcher. He was scared out of his wits. His wife, Ellen, stood by his bed, holding his hand, trying to overcome her own terror while helping her husband remain calm.

How much Valium have you given him? Gilbert asked the nurse who was taking care of Perini.

He’s had twenty milligrams IV over the last few hours, Dr. Gilbert.

Give him another five, and let’s go. Hospital administration has approved the helicopter.

They did? the nurse asked. Do you have the signed forms?

Being faxed—on their way. Now let’s get Mr. Perini on his way.

The nurse, obviously wary, told Gilbert that she would have to talk to the nursing supervisor on call.

Go right ahead. Liz Gold, my nurse practitioner, will take over until you get back.

As soon as the nurse was out of sight, Gilbert told Liz to help him push Perini and his IV poles to the elevator and then to the roof. He invited Mrs. Perini to accompany them to the helipad; then he whispered to Liz, We have to hurry, before the nursing supervisor or the dumb-ass hospital administrator puts the kibosh on this.

While they waited for the elevator, Gilbert realized that he now had to replace the nurse for the transfer. He anticipated, correctly as it turned out, that the patient would need active resuscitation while in the air. Since the helicopter was for civilian and not medical use, Gilbert would have to bring his own people and equipment. A paramedic had been easy to recruit from one of the ambulance teams that hung out at the ER, but he needed somebody with considerably more experience and expertise in handling serious cardiac arrhythmias. The only person he could trust in this situation was his nurse practitioner, Liz Gold.

Liz, I want you to go on the helicopter with me. Are you willing to do that?

The decision was complicated. Beyond her concern for her own personal safety, Liz and Gilbert had lots of history, some of it good but most of it bad. Liz had been the nurse in charge of the electrophysiology program when Gilbert arrived to take his staff position. It was a small operation with a limited number of procedures, and Gilbert was charged with modernizing things, bringing in new procedures and techniques, and building referral. Liz found all of this exciting and spent many hours with Gilbert, organizing the program, hiring staff, previewing and buying new equipment, and even working with architects to design a unit to house and monitor the arrhythmia patients they planned to attract.

It didn’t take long before Liz and Gilbert started to spend a lot of time together outside the hospital. Sure, they brought along work that they pretended to care about and discuss, but as time went by, the venues became much less amenable to work than to plain old cheating. The affair should have been predictable. Both were good-looking. Liz wouldn’t be mistaken for pretty, but she was a maniacal exerciser who kept her forty-year-old body trim and athletic. Gilbert was younger than Liz and also had a good body, his by genetic default, with boyish good looks that had always gotten him the women he wanted. And Gilbert was a hound, already known to have preyed on several nurses and staff at the hospital, even before his wife, Linda, had died. Liz knew all that and didn’t care. She was having some overdue fun.

Their flirting kept heating up until Gilbert leaned over and kissed Liz in a parking lot one night when he was dropping her off at her car. Groping led to petting led to motel rooms led to hot sex that neither could get enough of. And that would have been fine and dandy except for one small detail named Noah Gold.

Noah was Liz’s husband, a junior-college professor in Allentown who’d met Liz on a blind date shortly after her arrival from nurse practitioner school in Baltimore. Their courtship had been anything but promising. It wasn’t Noah’s doing. He was totally convinced that Liz was going to be his wife. Rather, Liz was the vacillator. She just wasn’t sure he was the one. She felt comfortable with Noah and lonely without him, and she knew her biological clock was running out of ticks, so after many months of uncertainty, she succumbed and agreed to marriage. Noah was ecstatic and spent the next few years attempting, in any way he could, to prove to Liz that she had made the right decision. They tried to have kids, but Liz couldn’t conceive. She was secretly relieved about that and found ways to delay the infertility work-up that Noah wanted so badly.

Which was a good thing, as it turned out, because shortly thereafter, Gilbert came along. Liz had feelings for him she never had for poor Noah. Is it love, she asked herself several times a day, or infatuation that will eventually melt away? It didn’t matter; Liz was smitten and had no plans to give up Gilbert for anything or anybody, including Noah.

Easy to say, but Liz was increasingly concerned that Noah was becoming suspicious about her absences. Liz frequently used nurse practitioner–practice meetings for cover, but Noah was now asking more questions about the subject matter of the meetings and who else from Allentown General attended. His questions convinced her that he was on her trail.

Liz knew she was playing a dangerous game. There were plenty of ways that Noah could discover her duplicity. People in Allentown liked to gossip, and Noah was friends with a number of people who worked at Allentown General. True, Noah liked to play the absent-minded professor, but Liz knew it was a ruse. He was keen observer who took everything in and, worse, had a temper that made Liz worry about what he might do to Gilbert and to her if he ever discovered their affair.

Fear of Noah’s reprisals and her animal attraction to Gilbert prompted Liz to pressure Gilbert to leave Allentown with her, to start their life together someplace—anyplace—else. Not exactly what Gilbert had in mind. Not only had he grown up in the area, but he liked his job at Allentown General and didn’t want to give up the referral practice he had so carefully built. He liked Liz a lot, and they had fun together, but she was not the woman he envisioned spending his life with, not by a long shot. He was enjoying his freedom.

So he made excuse after excuse for why he couldn’t take off with her and cohabit. They still saw each other because Ray enjoyed the sex, but Liz was impatient for a commitment of some kind. That they worked together only made things more difficult. His hope tonight was that she wouldn’t interpret his asking her to take on this emergency mission as anything more that it was—desperation. Her response worried him.

If you need me, Ray, of course I’ll do it. I would do anything for you.

"It’s a little dangerous, Liz. The weather is