A Pill to Change Your Life

Archive

In the cluttered sunroom I call my office, I store the ordinary keepsakes of my mother’s passing in a cardboard file box: her recipes, which I still consult for no-fail fudge and Swedish nut rolls; the journals she kept from her trips to Tuscany and Kyoto; love letters from my father. The keepsakes that are not so ordinary fill a whole drawer of a file cabinet: video clips from the CBS Evening News; folders of articles from major American newspapers; 5,473 pages of court testimony; stacks of internal drug company memos, FDA contacts, and Rezulin death lists; a documentary by a young filmmaker, 0274: Rezulin and the Death of Monica George.

The box holds pieces of the life she chose to preserve. The contents of the file cabinet are the stuff of bestselling medical mysteries and courtroom dramas. Sometimes I have trouble believing it all belongs to me. How did she die? Why did she die? For a time, these were questions pondered by drug company lawyers, prominent liver specialists, and millions of Americans watching the evening news.

I am the only one still asking these questions now.

The dictionary defines justice as “the quality of being true or correct.” I believe the truth of what happened to my mother can be found in these documents. However, I am not so sure that I can “do justice”—“reflect or express the worth of properly”—to her story. In the past few years I’ve gotten used to writing fiction, finding truths in worlds of my imagining. What I’m doing now seems backwards. In trying to find truth, I’m uncovering fictions and fantasies, lies and delusions—many of them my own.

Debut

My first exhibit is a copy of the New England Journal of Medicine from May 1, 1997. The voice of the woman who handled back issues became more respectful when I told her to address it to Dr. Storey. In fact, I have a PhD, but I never use the title except when I’m having a little fun with the medical profession. When I was in graduate school, people always asked with a small frown what I intended to do with a degree in Japanese literature. I knew what they were really asking—where’s the money in it? I mumbled that I planned to teach, which I did for several years at an adjunct’s salary. My students told me the main thing they learned in my classes was “never trust the narrator.” I left academia after my son was born, and occasionally pondered the usefulness of my studies myself. Since Rezulin, however, the skills of the literary scholar, dissecting fiction and researching a single topic to exhaustion, have been surprisingly useful.

Leafing through dozens of ads, I find the one I’m looking for: New Once-Daily Rezulin. There’s a photograph of a glass sphere split in two, a padlock hanging from its latch, pink and mauve molecules dancing above it. Below are the magic words: “Side effects comparable to placebo.” If you look on the next page at the table for placebo-controlled clinical studies, Rezulin is, for some side effects, safer than placebo. Safer than a fiction whose only power is that we believe in it.

My mother began taking Rezulin for her adult-onset diabetes in November 1997 because her doctor was concerned about her mildly elevated blood sugars. “I want them to be perfect,” he told her. Unlike Micronase, an older diabetes pill she had tried, Rezulin did not bring on dizzy spells. In fact, it didn’t affect her blood sugar at all. A retired geriatric nurse, my mother put herself on a quarter dose of the Micronase to supplement the Rezulin. Perfection was achieved.

Why did she continue to take a pill that didn’t work? When I look at the ad, I remember how excited my mother was about Rezulin. As a member of the “penicillin generation,” she had faith in modern medicine’s miracles. Rezulin was touted everywhere as a breakthrough in the treatment of diabetes; the newspapers...