“You can call me David, for starters,” David said. “Beyond that I was hoping to ask you some questions about Dr. Hodges.”
“That’s a rather strange request,” Dr. Holster said. He shrugged. “But I guess I don’t mind. Why are you interested?”
“It’s a long story,” David admitted. “But to make it short, I’ve had some patients whose hospital courses resembled some of Dr. Hodges’ patients’. A few of these patients were ones you treated.”
“Ask away,” Dr. Holster said.
“Before I do,” David said, “I’d also like to request this conversation be confidential.”
“Now you’re really piquing my curiosity,” Dr. Holster said. He nodded. “Confidential it will be.”
“I understand that Dr. Hodges visited you the day he disappeared,” David said.
“We had lunch, to be precise,” Dr. Holster said.
“I know that Dr. Hodges wanted to see you concerning a patient by the name of Clark Davenport.”
“That’s correct,” Dr. Holster said. “We had a long discussion about the case. Unfortunately, Mr. Davenport had just died. I’d treated him for prostate cancer with what we thought was great success only four or five months prior to his demise. Both Dr Hodges and myself were surprised and saddened by his passing.”
“Did Dr. Hodges ever mention exactly what Mr. Davenport died of?” David asked.
“Not that I recall,” Dr. Holster said. “I just assumed it was a recurrence of his prostate cancer. Why do you ask?”
“Mr. Davenport died in septic shock after a series of grand mal seizures,” David said. “I don’t think it was related to his cancer.”
“I don’t know if you can say that,” Dr. Holster said. “It sounds like he developed brain metastases.”
“His MRI was normal,” David said. “Of course, there was no autopsy so we don’t know for sure.”
“There could have been multiple tumors too small for the MRI to pick up,” Dr. Holster said.
“Did Dr. Hodges mention that there was anything about Mr. Davenport’s hospital course that he thought was out of the ordinary or unexpected?” David asked.
“Only his death,” Dr. Holster said.
“Did anything else come up during your lunch?”
“Not really. Not that I can recall,” Dr. Holster said. “When we were done eating I asked Dennis if he’d like to come back to the radiotherapy center and see the new machine he’d been responsible for us having received.”
“What machine is that?” David asked.
“Our linear accelerator,” Dr. Holster said. He beamed like a proud parent. “We have one of the best machines made. Dennis had never seen it although he’d intended to come by on numerous occasions. So we stopped in and I showed it to him. He was truly impressed. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Dr. Holster was out the door before David could respond one way or the other. He caught up with Dr. Holster halfway down a windowless hallway. David wasn’t much in the mood to see a radiotherapy machine, but to be polite he felt he had little choice. They reached the treatment room and approached a piece of high-tech equipment.
“Here she is,” Dr. Holster said proudly as he gave the stainless-steel machine an affectionate pat. The accelerator looked like an X-ray machine with an attached table. “If it hadn’t been for Dr. Hodges’ commitment to the hospital we never would have gotten this beauty. We’d be still using the old one.”
David gazed at the impressive apparatus. “What was wrong with the old one?” he asked.
“Nothing was wrong with it,” Dr. Holster said. “It was just yesterday’s technology: a cobalt-60 unit. A cobalt machine cannot be aimed as accurately as the linear accelerator. It’s a physics problem having to do with the size of the cobalt source which is about four inches in length. As a result, the gamma rays come out in every direction and are difficult to collimate.”
“I see,” David said, although he wasn’t quite sure he did. Physics had never been his forte.
“This linear accelerator is far superior,” Dr. Holster said. “It has a very small aperture from which the rays originate. And it can be programmed to have higher energy. Also, the cobalt machine requires the source to be changed every five years or so since the half-life of cobalt-60 is about six years.”