and I will be able to get toward the cost?”
Sutcliffe already had my application. I’d sent it to her the day after I hung up on Tate. She knew how much money we made. She smiled, and I felt lighter already.
“It looks like you’ll be able to get the maximum coverage.”
I smiled back. My body tingled like it was full of helium.
“That’s great news,” I said, letting go a deep sigh. “That’s incredibly generous.”
“Twelve thousand dollars is the largest per patient donation of any major pharmaceutical company.”
I swallowed air.
“Twelve thousand?” I said. “Ruby’s course of treatment is well over three hundred thousand dollars.”
Sutcliffe appeared genuinely surprised. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But you don’t qualify for our full access program.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because you have some form of insurance. The full access program is only for the uninsured. It’s also given out by lottery. We couldn’t afford to give our medications out for free. I guess I should have been more clear on the phone.”
I was speechless. For a while, I just stared blankly at the floor. Thinking.
This wasn’t a question of going into debt. This was about not being able to get the drug at all. Twelve thousand dollars represented two weeks of treatment at most.
I buried my indignation. At least we had something—a start.
“My wife and I are truly grateful for your generosity,” I said.
Vivian Sutcliffe smiled, evidently pleased. “We’re glad we can help.”
“One thing,” I asked, my mind already racing. “If Atrium is so bad and inflexible, what are some insurance companies that would have covered us for the full course of treatment?”
“Oh, that’s an easy one,” Sutcliffe said. “UniSol Health is the biggest and the best. They’d cover the full cost, even if the generic were available. I should know, because that’s who insures Wilhelm Genetics employees.”
“Thanks,” I said. I meant it, too. Because now I knew how I was going to fix our problem.
CHAPTER 5
I felt heartsick watching Ruby sleep. Was she thinner already? Had she become anemic? Her skin coloring matched the white of our bedsheets, and this was after taking Verbilifide for only two weeks. With credit cards we had enough money for another course of treatment, even though Ruby already didn’t want to take it.
It was hard for me to believe the drugs were better than the cancer. Ruby would sweat off pounds she didn’t have to spare while she slept. Pain would sometimes overtake her, leaving her breathless and doubled over, as though she’d been punched. Walking to the living room became a test of endurance. The drugs battling her disease kept calling up reinforcements from every vein in her body, marshaling the troops at the expense of her life spirit.
Ruby’s breathing, shallow and quick, matched the rhythm of my own beating heart, as though ours were two bodies entwined as one. I sat on the edge of the bed, stroking her hair, then brushed her skin with a cool, damp cloth to soak up the sweat. Her skin felt cool to the touch, slack where it should have been pliable. I wanted to suck up her sickness, like John Coffey from The Green Mile, and spit it out as a vile horde of black flies. Instead, I put on her latest favorite Pandora station—Adele and music that sounded just like Adele—and settled down at my desk to get to work.
The unfairness of it all didn’t matter. My wife ate organic, slept eight hours whenever she could, exercised, read up on all the supposedly dangerous products and chemicals to avoid. She embraced nature and natural living with enthusiasm, while nature kindly responded by spitting in her face. The why didn’t matter anymore: Ruby had cancer. Her life was now divided into two distinct epochs, Before Cancer (B.C.) and After Cancer (A.C.), and time would forever be measured against these markers. No, it wasn’t fair at all.
I held on to this thought while I configured my phone-spoofing application.
Before Ruby’s illness, I didn’t know much about phone-spoofing technology. I knew it worked through either PSTN or VoIP. Yeah, tech stuff and cancer share a common alphabet soup of indecipherable terminology. Voice over Internet Protocol—that’s longhand for VoIP—is a communication protocol for delivering voice and multimedia data over the Internet. Most of the phone-spoofing services I found relied on the VoIP protocol over PSTN because it was easier to use and a lot more flexible for breaking the law.
Web sites advertising this type of service tried to highlight legitimate reasons for their use. Say, for example,