Very excited! My new novel, Thawing A.C. Nielsen, is now up and available for "pre-sale" (just $2.99 for Kindle or other ebook format, then price goes up before the holidays) on Kindle here:
http://amzn.to/2bULRD1
Selling like crazy- please go to that link and consider ordering the ebook or at least sharing the info with other book enthusiasts! It's already hitting top 100 various genre lists on Amazon!
Newly posted there-- a 5-star review from one of the top reviewing companies! Until it goes "live for sale" there won't be any customer reviews or samples-- that happens Oct. 18th. There will also be a paperback version up soon. Check it out and please spread the word. I need all the publicity help I can get since I am not giving away my book to a mainstream publishing house!
I am wondering if any of you would consider reviewing the book. It will be released on Amazon/Kindle on October 18th. I need reviews from regular folks posted to amazon on the release day, if possible. You get a FREE pdf, word.doc or .mobi (Kindle ebook file) copy and plenty of time between now and mid-October to read it. Let me know, friends!
In Chapter 25 we find out just how sick poor little Mr. T the guinea pig is, AND a new main character begins to step forward--it's a bit of a shocker. This chapter has all sorts of interesting medical stuff in it. No, it won't be over your head- it's cool and crazy!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
At one p.m. on the dot, Mike entered the lab, looking very
anxious. The rest of the employees had arrived, sensing something important was
about to be revealed. Kate noticed that Miles, the odd dude from A.C. Nielsen’s
apartment, was there as well. Guess he’s
curious about what’s going on, she thought. She had become so focused on
her lab work over the last number of months that she hardly remembered what his
face looked like. She did, however, remember his brash attitude.
Amman and Shipley entered the room and Kate got
right to business. “Thank you all for being here. Today we have a guest from
San Francisco, Dr. John Shipley. Amman and he earned their advanced veterinary
degrees together at Cornell, the best vet school in the country, I’m told.
Amman and Dr. Shipley have been reviewing Mr. T’s case for the last week via
e-mail and Skype. Dr. Shipley has been helping interpret Mr. T’s well-being
since his expertise is in animal behavior. Amman, please go ahead.”
“Hello, everyone. First
I want to tell you what incredible things you’ve done here lately. I’ve never
been on a team of people with so many amazing and quite diverse backgrounds.”
“They are a heck of a
Venn diagram, that’s for sure!” Kate said, attempting to lessen the tension building
in the room.
“Think about it,
folks—we’re pioneering in areas where most would fear to tread,” Amman
continued. “We’ve brought an animal back to life. He’s right here in this room
with us and he’s been here for three weeks already. We’ve proven that Mike and
Dr. Saltieri were right, that it can be done. We also seemed to have stumbled
upon a possible cure for cancer. That alone is beyond incredible, and there are
probably years of research that could come out of that. You have an amazing young
leader in Katherine Pearson and an inspirational, visionary founder in Mike
Burgess, but now a very large challenge has presented itself here. We know that Mr. T stabilized quickly. By the second day he
seemed pretty normal. But on that day I thought his EEG looked a bit unusual. I
gave it some time, checking twice a day to see what would happen. Well, every
few days it looked more and more odd, but I still just thought it might have
had something to do with the fact that he had been frozen so long, that his
system still had some kinks. However, as time has passed the EEG has become
much worse, I’m sorry to say. Mr. T’s brain is damaged. The damage is
progressive. He has two to six weeks to live. There is no known cure for his
condition.” Everyone in the room gasped and looked around at each other,
stunned.
“He looks fine. How sick
can he be?” Chrissy said, trying to fight back tears.
“Amman and I are sorry
to bring you this news, but you have to be scientists here,” Shipley said,
jumping in. “If any of you have fallen into this trap, you really have to stop thinking
of him as your pet.”
“So what’s wrong with
him?” Mike asked grimly.
“Like I said, his brain
is not functioning properly,” Amman began. “It’s in rapid deterioration. He
will start sliding more and more and you’ll see the progression plainly every
few days. Here, take a look at this EEG printout Dr. Shipley brought in of a
normal guinea pig, and then look at Mr. T’s.” They watched intently as Shipley
showed the comparison. “Do you see the little rapid zigs and zags in Mr. T’s
EEG? This is from week one. And here’s a sample from week two. More zigs and
zags and far more frequently. And here’s today—quite pronounced, you see?”
“Now take a look at this
video I prepared,” said Shipley as he opened his laptop. Everyone gathered
around. “Guinea pigs wiggle a lot, right? Here is a healthy guinea pig wiggling
around, eating and drinking, moving about in his cage.” After two minutes
Shipley closed the video. “Now next, this is Mr. T from this morning.” Shipley
started the second video. “Notice anything?”
“No, not really.”
Chrissy said. “They look the same to me.”
“I can’t see anything
either.” Deirdre shrugged. “Maybe I’m stupid.”
“No, you’re not,”
Shipley said patiently. “Pretend you aren’t expecting a guinea pig to be such a
wiggler and watch it now in slow motion.” Shipley ran back to the beginning of
Mr. T’s behavioral video and set it to play in slow motion. Suddenly it was
obvious—Mr. T wasn’t wiggling, he was convulsing. It didn’t appear normal at
all when viewed in slo-mo. Now that Amman and Shipley had sharpened their eyes,
everyone in the room could see the pronounced difference between the healthy
pig and Mr. T. They all nodded to Shipley—now they saw it.
“What do you think, Dr.
Radelet? Diagnosis?” Amman asked.
“Wait, I’m thinking, I’m
thinking,” Edouard said, cradling his head in his hands and concentrating. A
few seconds later, “It’s something neurological, obviously. I can’t pin it
down. Give me a minute.”
“Take your time. We know
you’re not a veterinarian. Anyone else—ideas?”
Edouard was still deep
in thought, his eyes rolling up toward the ceiling now and then, in
concentration. “I’ve got it. It’s progressive myoclonus epilepsy.”
“No, Edouard, but yes,
the EEG would look similar,” Amman conceded. “Anyone else?”
An unexpected voice in
the back of the room leaped out. “It’s sporadic prion disease, similar to mad cow
disease!” All heads whipped around to see who had spoken. It was, to their
great collective surprise, Miles, the geek from the A.C. Nielsen apartment.
“Prion disease—proteins folding over on themselves and destroying their own
function, deforming and encouraging other proteins to fold over in the brain,
too. The brain goes haywire and destroys itself. The rapid EEG zigs and zags
are the signal of chronic myoclonic jerks caused by the progressive brain
damage.”
“Please, somebody slow
down and tell me what the hell is going on,” Norm pleaded.
“Norm, have you ever had
a massive spasm or jerk in your body just as you almost drifted off to sleep?” Miles
asked. “I think we all have them. That’s called a hypnic jerk, which is a type
of myoclonic jerk. Some people say the hypnic jerk, the one, like I say, where
you jolt as you fall asleep, is a survival tool from our past. Like ‘Hey, don’t
fall asleep too fast, Mr. Caveman. Take another look outside your cave and make
sure some saber tooth tiger isn’t about to eat you,’ that kind of thing. In
modern humans, myoclonic jerks happening quite frequently can be a sign of
Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and some forms of epilepsy. You’re correct there, of
course, Dr. Radelet. It’s generally a sign of a damaged brain. A jerk just now
and then is fine, as you all probably think I’m one and you only see me now and
then.” Miles paused as people chuckled. “But you can see Mr. T has them all the
time. It’s a symptom of the prion-created brain damage. And just so you know,
myoclonic jerks are part of the puzzle on the second episode of the first
season of House, the TV show. There they are a sign of subacute
sclerosing panencephalitis, which is a persistent measles infection in
children, usually fatal. But I don’t think Mr. T has the measles.” Everyone
stared at Miles as if he were from some other planet where somehow everyone is a
master medical diagnostician. “Hey, when I’m at home I don’t watch Happy
Days or Mork and Mindy all the time.” He shrugged. Everyone
chuckled. Now it made sense. The supergeek was also, apparently, an idiot
savant riffing at them from an old episode of House, M.D.
“Very interesting, Miles,”
Amman said, “and also quite accurate. Remarkable employee, Mike! Miles has
conjectured correctly. This particular prion disease we’re looking at is not
the mad cow variety or the chronic wasting disease you see in large animals
like elk. Not that there’s that much difference. Either way the brain loses
function quickly. All those proteins folding over cause cellular damage and
holes all over the brain. We call it spongiform encephalopathy because the normally
compact brain looks, under a microscope, spongy where the holes start
appearing. The abnormal EEG and the associated myoclonic jerks I first noticed
are early signs of the disease. I’m sorry I took so long to put it together. It
wasn’t something I would have expected to pop up. It’s amazing that your Miles recognized
it so easily. Kudos to you, sir. Anyway, look at this photograph—I’ll pass it
around for each of you to get a good look. This is severely damaged brain
tissue in the later stages of the disease so that you can see what we mean by
spongiform. See all the holes, the dark spots?”
“Wow, look at that,”
Norm gasped, examined the photo closely, then handed it to Mike. “That looks
bad.”
“So what causes these diseases?”
Mike asked.
“The mad cow form is
transmitted through contaminated animal feed, or in a lab due to poor attention
to cleanliness,” Amman explained. “It can be transmitted via contaminated
surgical equipment and so on. But Shipley and I are pretty sure that this is
the other form, the sporadic version that Miles mentioned, where the source of
the prion problems is completely unknown. In this form, the prion attack is
similar to how viruses attack the body. In fact, for years researchers thought
a virus was at work. But prions aren’t viruses, they’re proteins. We all have
proteins in our bodies and some of us may have a few of these mutant proteins,
the prions, inside us, too. They’re out in the natural world as well, even just
laying around in the earth’s soil. They’re proteins with a demented, super-nasty
streak.”
“Without quibbling too
much right now about these details, people,” Kate said earnestly, “the main
point is that we have a patient with some form of prion disease leading soon to
death. That much is certain.”
“Hang on. I’m still
catching up, Kate.” Mike fiddled with a pencil and a spiral notebook. “I’m not
a biologist or a doc, remember? Prion, how do you spell that?”
“P-R-I-O-N, Mike, rhymes
with neon,” Kate said.
“We’ll take a day or two and get everyone up to speed on prion diseases, mad cow,
the whole nine yards. We’ll compile a Prion Diseases for Dummies.”
“Here’s a factoid for
you all,” Miles chimed in again from the back of the room. “In humans it’s
called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. People go from normal, to messed up, to dead
very quickly. In diagnosis, CJD can be confirmed by biopsy of the tonsils,
since they harbor a significant amount of the PrPSc prions, thus distinguishing
the CJD from other suspects such as Alzheimer’s. Oh, and cannibals can get it,
too. From eating damaged brains—yum. Hannibal Lecter be warned!”
“And all that was on House,
too?” Shipley asked.
“No, it’s just stuff I know.
Mr. Burgess knows where I get all this,” Miles said cryptically.
“So, what I want to know
is, are we in danger?” Norm asked. “Is this contagious? That’s not something I
want to deal with.”
“No, Norm,” Amman assured,
“it’s not easily transmissible in humans or from animals to humans. Most forms
happen out of nowhere. The sporadic version most likely is genetic. But we’re
not totally sure of that. It’s a strange disease presenting in multiple forms
and we really know very little about it.”
“And a cure? Did you say
we can’t save Mr. T?” Chrissy asked.
“There’s no cure,
Chrissy,” Shipley said. “It’s a degenerative disease. Once you have it, it’s
all downhill. No cure for animals, nor for humans. Some people are hunting for
one, but so far, little progress has been made. Some people think there may be
an environmental issue involved. Anyway, Mr. T will soon convulse more than
ever. It will progress to where he will look like he’s having severe grand mal
epileptic seizures. After that subsides he’ll become listless, lose his
appetite, lose his sense of direction and balance, become zombie-like, and die
as his brain commits suicide in front of your eyes. I know some of you have
become attached to your patient, but you must let go of that. He won’t be in
any pain during any of this. Now is when we put on our lab coats and study him
and learn. And, remember, who knows where this came from. Maybe he already had
this disease before he was frozen. It’s likely this has nothing to do at all
with the cryo process. But you must research all that. By the way, I like Miles’
tonsil idea. We should biopsy them and also run him through the MRI in the other
room. What do you say, Amman?”
“Right—great idea.
Prions are everywhere, keep in mind. We don’t think about them until they
malfunction within the brain and we become aware of them. We don’t know much
about why they do this folding over of their material and how or why they
encourage other proteins to do the same. But I am going to assume that all of
you will be prion disease experts very soon.”
“It sounds like Miles
already is,” Mike said. “Thanks for joining us, Miles. I thought you might be
interested in this.”
“Thanks for inviting me,
Mr. Burgess.”
“‘Thanks for inviting me,’ he says?”
Kate mumbled to herself. Yu-Gi-Oh tournament dude Miles
standing there in the torn Whitesnake T-shirt? Mike invited him to show up? Really? Wow, I never—totally never
saw that coming.
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