Chapter 15
Hot Man Reading
“You have a minute?” I asked as I peeked into Hector’s office.
“Sure, come in.”
I dropped the thick stack of papers organized in manila folders onto his desk, where they landed with a heavy thud.
Hector blinked at me. “What’s this?” he asked.
“The admission questionnaires for the trial. We have ten potential participants, and three are borderline. I’d like to discuss them with you.”
He let out a long breath and was likely considering how to get out of this, but he knew he couldn’t. This was the part of clinical trials no one liked: Deciding who got in.
“Fine,” he said. “Close the door.”
We went through the seven I was certain we would allow into the trial, and he agreed on each of them. Then, the hard part began.
“She is so young and has a baby—” I defended my position on one of the potential participants.
“Even if she weren’t young or didn’t have a baby,” Hector argued, “it doesn’t change the staging—”
“But it’s barely outside the trial criteria—”
“Say that word again?”
I blinked at him. “What word?”
“What you used right after ‘barely.’”
I rolled my eyes. “Outside. You want me to say it’s outside the trial criteria. I know that Hector, but—”
“Look, I appreciate you wanting to save everyone. I do too. But if we bend the trial criteria, we are skewing the results. And you know in order to change the protocol, we’d have to go through the internal review board again anyway—”
“Yeah. Yeah. I get your point.”
It was so frustrating to have someone I knew would benefit from the new treatment protocol but couldn’t get it because the trial wasn’t yet widely available.
“Hey, thanks for this,” I said after I had a moment to process my disappointment. “The trial needs your sternness.”
“You can be stern,” Hector reassured me.
I scoffed.
“You can,” he insisted. “I wasn’t always like this. When I first started out, I was just like you. I wanted to put everyone in my trial.”
“You did?”
Hector nodded. “I did. But I couldn’t, and neither can you.”
The second borderline participant we deemed eligible, and I stacked her file with the other seven. And the last one, like the new mom, was deemed ineligible. I shrank deeper and deeper into my doctor’s coat as we made those life-altering calls.
Finally, I straightened my spine. We had to do what we had to do. Moping about it wouldn’t change a damn thing.
“Can I ask you something?” Hector asked.
“Sure.”