The Last Rose of Summer

By Mary Austin

While working independently as a pre-med student at Cleary University, the soon-to-be physician, Mary Austin, discovers a remarkable, non-toxic drug that could offer tremendous hope to cancer patients. Her work is headed for publication in a top medical journal until a drug company begins negotiations with her bosses from which she is mysteriously excluded.

Amid egregious sexual harassment, Mary’s materials are blatantly sabotaged. As death threats follow and her work becomes impossible, she is accepted at Whitehead College of Medicine despite evidence that her bosses tampered with her application process. After becoming a pediatrics resident, she shares her story with her beloved mentor, Dr. Daniel Taylor, who allows her to temporarily leave her residency training to reproduce the work. Her joy turns to sorrow and then determination when she learns that Dr. Taylor is battling terminal pancreatic cancer. Even as a chain of events prompts the sabotage of Mary’s drug stock and leaves her seemingly without any choice but to permanently leave academic medicine, the story of her drug is not over yet.

In this novel inspired by a true story, after a young cancer researcher discovers a breakthrough drug that could change chemotherapy, the drug industry suppresses the breakthrough and transforms her life and career forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jun 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781480890534

Mary Austin

Mary Austin (1868-1934) came to California in 1887 to homestead with her family in Kern County, in the Great Central Valley. She is the author of many novels, essays, and story collections. John Walton, the author of Western Times and Water Wars (California 1992), is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis.

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Copyright © 2020 Mary Austin.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-9051-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9052-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9053-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020909758

Archway Publishing rev. date: 6/23/2020

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Introduction

Always With Me (Itsumo Nando Demo)

The Lark In The Clear Air

The Impossible Dream

Until The Real Thing Comes Along

Do Virgins Taste Better?

Walkin’ My Baby Back Home

All Through The Night

Morning Has Broken

Thought It Was A Nightmare

St. Elmo’s Fire (Man In Motion)

‘Tis The Last Rose Of Summer

Grief

End Notes

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The quality and style of writing in this novel will vary considerably from one part to the next. This is because my life has been repeatedly threatened and attacked while I’ve been writing, including and especially with toxic doses of electromagnetic radiation in my home. My animals and I have been extremely sick. We’ve all had the advanced symptoms of this type of poisoning, including muscle spasms, constant vomiting, and heart rhythm disturbances. The nervous system is a primary target organ; early symptoms include insomnia and difficult concentrating. Visual disturbances, painful tingling in the skin, tremors, memory loss, and autonomic nervous system dysfunction follow.

Some people are rather harsh literary critics.

At first, I had no idea why we were all getting so sick. Fortunately, I wrote some important parts of this book before it became too difficult to write in my usual style. I eventually diagnosed myself and received medical care, which was initially a good deal harder than finding appropriate veterinary medical care for my cats. I sometimes felt like asking the vets if they wouldn’t mind treating me too; I am certain that any pet owner who has ever experienced the American healthcare system will relate.

I’ve also had a guy show up at my house at night and point a gun at me, which is a bit more straightforward, but if you’re curious how it’s possible to poison someone with electromagnetic radiation, google KKK Muslims radiation gun. Thank God the innocent Muslims targeted by these terrorists were unharmed, as the FBI caught the men who wanted to torment and kill them. However, the case provides an example of the specific threat as well as the horrors of Islamophobia.

This is an expensive way to try to kill someone, but it’s an option if someone with a lot of money wants you dead without a homicide by gunshot. Most people aren’t aware of this kind of weapon, and the poisoning doesn’t show up on toxicology tests (although, after figuring it out, I was able to detect the high levels of radiation in my home).

Unfortunately, per legal advice I cannot thank by name here the human doctors or veterinarians who treated us, to whom I am profoundly grateful. My three beloved cats all died, but the veterinarians were superb and did all that could be done. As for me, I’m recovering, and gabapentin, a seizure drug, has been indispensable in treating my symptoms. Many thanks to the neurologist who prescribed it. Thank you also to my family, friends and neighbors for all your love and support. My neighbors allowed me to shelter in their homes at times when my own home was too dangerous to live in, despite the risk they incurred by doing so.

Because there are (so I hope) no other cases of poisoning to this degree in humans, it’s impossible to be sure whether I will make a full recovery, yet I have faith in God that I will.

Which leads me to one final note: I reference the Christian faith at intervals throughout this book, as I have never seen why science and faith must remain mutually exclusive. I do not in any way intend to suggest that the views of those who practice a different faith, or who do not believe in any deity, should be in any way subordinated to mine. Along with my entire family and all my friends, I believe passionately in freedom of belief or skepticism. I simply write from the perspective I’ve developed in the course of my life, and I support the right of others to do the same.

INTRODUCTION

Once, when I was twenty, I watched a surgeon place a chest tube in a lung cancer patient in order to drain a large amount of bloody fluid out of his chest cavity. On an X-ray, the fluid around the tumor was pretty much drowning the patient’s left lung, preventing the poor man from breathing normally. He was a grandfather and a brave old soldier who’d received his cigarettes in standard rations from the Army when he’d served in World War II. Consequently, like many men of his generation, he’d become a smoker for life.

He listened calmly as the surgeon explained the usual risks and benefits of the surgical procedure, taking it all in with the stoicism he had learned in war, even smiling to help comfort his children and grandchildren who were gathered around with terrified expressions. He listened to the risks of anesthesia, which include death, and as his son pressed the surgeon for answers on a number of further questions, the old man kept calm and tried to tell him everything would be fine. He signed the consent forms without hesitation, and the family left the room for the duration of the procedure.

But under a form of sedation that left him breathing on his own, and unlikely to remember the procedure, all his conscious bravery was stripped away, leaving his consciousness naked in its response to pain. I saw that he was suffering despite the anesthetic. I’m pathologically sensitive to other people, and I know he felt the knife. Later I would learn he was under-sedated. The guy doing the procedure didn’t seem to notice, or perhaps care, given some of his later actions.

It wasn’t the liter or more of bloody fluid that poured out of his chest cavity that got to me. I grew up on a farm and have never been squeamish about fluids. It was the way that he kept spasming away as the surgeon cut his flesh; it was the groaning and occasional gasps, the totally unnecessary barbarism that I couldn’t stop.

I fainted. Nobody was standing close enough to catch me, so I dropped backwards onto the tile floor and cracked my head. They told me when I woke that I had only passed out for a few seconds. I came to with that strange feeling of having ants crawling on my face, and my head hurt, and the world swam back into focus. The world was, of course, just as awful as ever, but I woke.

A young technician, thinking I had fainted from the sight of all the blood, kindly told me, It’s okay. Everybody faints the first time. This, I would learn, is generally true.

I’d go on to see a hell of a lot more stuff that bad and worse. I’d become the one doing procedures, although I actually cared whether my patients felt pain. I managed to stand, and I went on. I almost never need anyone to catch me, which is good, because nobody’s ever there to do it.

But I need someone to catch me now, and if anybody does, oh my God, I can catch a lot of other people. I can catch just about anything, but I’m falling now. Please, catch me! Catch me just this once! I hardly ever fall! Please don’t let me be the only one. If I hit the floor this time, I don’t know if I’m ever going to wake up alive again in this world, and I’m absolutely certain that millions of other people will not.

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind

–Emily Dickinson

Hi, I’m Mary Austin, and I’ll be your fictional narrator today, telling a fictional story about fictional people doing fictional cancer research in fictional places.

No, really, this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

I swear.

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ALWAYS WITH ME

(ITSUMO NANDO DEMO)

So many tears of sadness, uncountable through and through

I know on the other side of them I’ll find you…

The whispering voice, we never want to forget

In each passing memory, always there to guide you

When a mirror has been broken, shattered pieces scattered on the ground

Glimpses of new life, reflected all around

Window of beginning, stillness, new light of the dawn…

–Youmi Kimura and Wakako Kaku

T here was once a man I loved with all my heart. He was married, and old enough to be my grandfather besides, and I worked for him, so of course, this wasn’t a romantic love. Still, I loved him so fiercely that my fiancé, Dwight, would refer to him humorously as my other man.

His name was Daniel Taylor, and he was famous the world over for his brilliant work in pediatrics. He was an old-school academic who passionately believed in advancing scientific knowledge, and while he always proved himself an extremely astute manager of resources, money never came first. Had he wanted to use his scientific and strategic genius purely for his own enrichment, no doubt he could have become a billionaire. Instead, he poured his life and his considerable gifts entirely into growing a hospital, pushing back the frontiers of medical science, and, over a long and luminous career in pediatrics, personally caring for thousands of desperately sick children.

As anyone can tell you who has ever taken on the burden of caring for the sick, whether in a healing profession or in caring for a loved one, the linchpin of the task is to care first and foremost, and indeed only, about that person. "The secret to caring for the patient is to care about the patient," said Sir William Osler, the father of modern medicine.

Of course, he’s right. He’s right because it’s just too hard to do the job properly if you don’t pour everything you have into the task. You have to believe while you listen to your patient telling you his problem that there is no other person and no other problem in the world, and then you can serve effectively. Daniel served medicine with his whole great mind and with the entirety of his even greater heart and soul.

He’d served brilliantly for decades at the helm of Whitehead College of Medicine and its affiliated children’s hospital, the latter of which had been a backwater with a few dozen docs on faculty when he’d taken over. He’d transformed it into a nationally elite institution with a several hundred doctors on faculty, including a number of luminaries with international name recognition in their fields. Because of his leadership, Whitehead had become one of the top medical schools in the nation while I studied there.

Its standing would drop precipitously after his leadership was tragically thrown away, thanks to the opaque and frankly bizarre decisions of its insular board. But I was in the last group of medical students who entered that school under his leadership, and while he led us, we knew that our educations were not only safe, but guaranteed to continue at a level that would never limit our dreams.

Daniel was also unusually fun to encounter, especially for a lowly med student meeting a man of his legendary stature. He told us to call his office with any questions about our futures and then added, to general laughter, Just call me! When I pick up the phone myself, sometimes, people just panic and hang up.

A student-run satirical publication came out several times a year to lampoon life in medical school, and the writers would frequently lead with an article having fun with our master and commander. No matter how ridiculous it got, there was, of course, never even the slightest hint of repercussions from Daniel, who’d laugh at anything. He would even participate in the end-of-the-year video the students always put out, which poked fun at life at our school, and any sketch that featured him at all was always met with shouts of laughter and thunderous applause.

One sketch during the year-end show, which portrayed him as The Wizard of Whitehead Med, featured several second-year students setting off across the medical campus dressed as the stars of the Wizard of Oz; only the Wizard could give them the brains and the hearts that they needed! My old friend from high school, Sally Maxwell, was dressed up as Dorothy, with her long blond hair in two braids and a plush Toto in a basket in her hand, skipping arm in arm with three of her classmates dressed as the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow. In a verse that described the Wizard’s genius, I’ll never forget the laughter at the line: …though he hasn’t a hair on his head! / We’re off the see the Wizard, the Wizard of Whitehead Med!

Daniel was indeed completely bald, and he found the whole sketch hilarious; remarks about his appearance, inevitable for a man so much in the public eye, never fazed him for a moment. He was a slender, fit man of average height, totally unbowed by age, but his head was so unusually small for his size that, apparently, when he presented for military service in Vietnam and reported his hat size to be issued his officer’s hat, he was told that he couldn’t possibly be smart enough to serve. He told this story himself to me and to the other residents who were at dinner at his house.

Needless to say, that story sent all of us into gales of laughter, and Daniel was right there laughing along with us. It was a subject of humor all over the medical center that our leader, who had such a small head, was smarter than all of us put together.

He allowed Sally and company to use his office as they filmed the end of their journey, and he briefly appeared at the end of the sketch after being referred to as The Man Behind the Door. The central comedy of the sketch was that, to all of us, he really was a wizard who, through his passionate devotion to medical education, would indeed equip us with all we needed in order to succeed. He was no Man behind the Curtain; indeed, he wasn’t even behind his door any longer than was necessary, but out among us. He seriously seemed able to be everywhere at once.

Under his leadership, the atmosphere at Whitehead was unusually fun for an academic center. Sophomoric humor and salty language weren’t frowned on so long as people remained genuinely respectful of one another. The professors maintained close friendships with the students, and the atmosphere in the lecture halls was informal, even jovial. We took our mission very seriously without taking ourselves very seriously; consequently, a number of professors with national and international reputations refused plum offers from elite universities because they loved our institution’s fun-loving, down-to-earth approach to serious academics. They just couldn’t leave while Daniel was there.

By contrast, his relentless devotion to duty made his authority unpalatable to some board members, who were, in many cases, businessmen with no medical training. One might have welcomed their input in financial matters if their decisions, which led to allegations of conflicts of interest, had not led to the deterioration of the school’s finances the minute the board had a president who would go along with their idiotic recommendations.

Daniel never would have brooked such absurd decisions, yet despite his excellent financial acumen, which had left the hospital and university on very sound financial ground, these same businessmen felt that he didn’t focus sufficiently on profit. Despite his excellent health and his totally undiminished brilliance, they felt his age was compromising his judgment: he simply didn’t grasp the importance of corporate connections in the modern medical world. Despite his internationally established reputation for medical statesmanship, they felt he didn’t understand, as they did, that in the modern age of medicine, one waged war instead of building bridges between institutions. They felt that he didn’t understand, as they did, that only prioritizing relationships with drug companies would ensure the hospital’s continued growth.

They eventually managed to oust our Daniel as president of the medical school, replacing him with an industry-connected stooge who would, ironically, go on to ruin the school’s finances and relationships with foolishly aggressive decisions. This, in turn, demolished its academic standing because many illustrious faculty members understandably sought out better leadership at other institutions. Residency programs which had been nationally competitive were soon floundering; for some, there was no longer a question of finding the strongest applicants, or even decent applicants; programs were scrambling for any applicants at all.

The change in leadership also imposed a dysfunctional corporate culture that simultaneously crushed all fun while dragging standards into the gutter. It is hard to overstate what a wreck that board made of the institution’s national standing and local partnerships, all of which had been painstakingly crafted over many decades, in no small part by Daniel.

Yet Daniel remained at the helm of pediatrics and the children’s hospital, where I would continue my training after medical school; while we looked on with alarm at the foundering of the medical school around us, we knew our department and hospital would stay high and dry. More importantly, and thank God, so would the children’s care, no matter whether their parents were rich or poor.

Meanwhile, the board’s decisions proved so disastrous that a private soiree took place to discuss how to right the sinking ship. The party was hosted in part by Daniel’s grown children, who were respected members of the community in their own right. In business, in policy, and in basic moral leadership, Daniel’s children had helped to carry on what he had begun, and all the guests at the party were prominent members of the medical community and the broader society of the city. The situation had become so dire that the favors given to the guests were model lighthouses: no matter how bright the beacon of hope, these implied, one had to heed the warning for that message to matter.

After a few years of Daniel’s replacement disastrously leading the place, the medical school was foundering on the shoals for no reason. We pediatric residents would find ourselves answering all kinds of whispered questions from concerned interviewees applying to our program. Although, under Daniel, our program remained among the country’s best pediatric residency programs, the medical school’s huge and entirely self-created logistical and financial problems had been national medical news.

Not being stupid, but not being particularly politically savvy either, the interviewing med students would bluntly ask us questions like Good God, what’s going on with the med school? Is it going to be okay here?

And we’d tell them, Don’t worry. It’s a mess for all the other departments, but we’re going to be fine. Here’s why… and we’d explain how Daniel’s decisions had sheltered us from the storm.

Daniel, like others of his generation, practiced medicine in a way the board considered far too idealized for modern realities, even as their own plans caused nothing but financial and reputational destruction. They wanted Daniel to retire, even though he remained at the height of his intellectual powers and he showed up to work hours before any of them did and remained later. The principal administrators of the school all had reserved parking spaces; Daniel, despite occupying a comparable position of power, had no reserved space because he showed up to work so early that he had his choice of parking spots anyway. He played basketball with his residents during retreats and, in his late sixties, could outrun many of his twenty-something trainees, something we all laughed about. We only half-jokingly called ourselves Daniel’s Kids.

Still, they felt he was too old to continue to lead, because people who can make no valid argument tend to make arguments based on meaningless characteristics such as age. By the way, as I rose to their attention in the situation I must recount to you, these same people felt that I was also too starry-eyed about medicine, and they thought this was the case because I was so young. He was seventy, and I was twenty-seven, and we were the only two people who tried to pursue a particularly important project in cancer research wholeheartedly for the patients, without concern for profit or potential political conflicts.

In between our two extremes of age, the failure rate in that regard was a hundred per cent, and Daniel would die. This is the story I must tell you.

The first time I ever stepped into Daniel’s office, he was sixty-seven and set for perhaps another sixty-seven years on this earth; we all fervently hoped this would be so, and between his astonishing physical and spiritual vitality, it seemed quite possible, if only because he was Daniel.

I can recall one day, early on in my first year of medical school, when I was sitting in a room with a group of other first year students, listening to one of the second-year students who had kindly volunteered to advise us. Daniel was still the president of the school and, as ever, not the sort of administrator who’d hide behind a desk all day; he’d sometimes sit in on lectures to see for himself what instruction the students were receiving (causing a degree of nervous chagrin among some lecturers). Our advisor, Ruth, whom I would follow into Daniel’s training program, went on at some length about everything he’d done for the medical school; she wanted to ease our anxiety by reassuring us that we were in good hands.

Ruth simply laid out the facts, her voice suffused with the love and admiration for him that I would quickly come to share.

She paused for questions, and someone broke the silence that followed with the rather candid remark: I hope he doesn’t die.

This was met with the sort of laughter you get when somebody blurts out what everybody in the room is silently thinking, and Ruth replied with a chuckle, Don’t worry about it. He seems to be going pretty strong.

As I continued in school, I gave no thought to the possibility of losing him; the possibility was both too unlikely and too awful to contemplate. I