✅ Younger Than You Think?

"3: Doctor's Office"

"We can't offer a drug like this to a patient who doesn't meet the criteria," the man in the suit said, looking down at a clipboard filled with notes in his hands. "Especially not a child of this age."

"Why not?" Iriña piped up, and the suited figure looked to one side in a moment of confusion. He was used to having these conversations with doctors, not patients, although it wasn't entirely unheard of for them to be present. But he'd never been directly questioned by a patient who was still in diapers. "I think Uncle Chad's theories seem pretty solid, and your drug could keep me alive."

"The young lady is right," the doctor chipped in. "In this particular case, it seems that the benefits vastly outweigh the side effects."

"Listen," the drug company rep looked down at his notes again. This whole situation was messed up. He'd got into this industry to make staggering amounts of money using his silver tongue to persuade doctors that the latest drug of the day was exactly what all their patients needed. But today he'd been practically ambushed by a doctor begging for a drug that wasn't even on his list. He wasn't used to saying 'no' when there was clearly money on the table.

"Listen," he said again. "I can put a request in to management, but I have to declare that I've told you all the side effects and you understand them. Okay?"

"We know them," Iriña's dad said. He really wished that Chad could have been there with them; but the scientist had felt that his presence was a bit of a political hot potato.

"This drug..." the rep scanned his papers again. It wasn't just time-filling activity; this part of his visit had been added at the last minute, and he wasn't personally familiar with the drug in question. But the notres did say clearly that salespeople weren't supposed to even say the name of the medication; all part of the company's determined effort to pretend that they had never invented it. "It was intended as an antidepressant, but stage three human trials showed almost no effects. It regulates and stabilises the levels of some erionetic neurotransmitters in monkeys, but apparently not in humans."

"We don't need an antidepressant or mood stabiliser," Iriña pointed out. "This is an off-label prescription, where the side effects should prove beneficial." Her words weren't as clear as they could have been; her tongue was still weak and her vocal folds weren't fully developed. But even with a slight lisp, it would be hard for the rep to tell himself that she didn't understand what she was saying.

"However," he continued, "a number of the trial subjects noted severe insomnia. Diagnosis of these issues was a little confused, as they suffered the neurological degradation that follows from lack of sleep without any of the hormonal markers that would normally be used to confirm that a patient suffers from insomnia. A number of patients died as a result of these trials. And for those who completed the study, the results were worse. It seems that the... the drug in question has a severe addiction propensity. After stopping treatment, until the brain's chemistry has reset to normal, patients cannot sleep. For up to five days after ceasing treatment, trial subjects were unable to wake from normal sleep. The survivors have now been advised to continue with the same treatment regimen unless they are able to organise three to five days of constant stimulation in order to prevent them sleeping. For anyone with a weaker constitution, the already-serious consequences of insomnia could make this impossible. For a child, there would be no safe means to stop treatment once started."

"That's the point," Iriña was the one to interrupt again. "My brain is missing the interlateral somnolent node. You don't need any kind of weird stimulation because I can't sleep. I've had toxins building up in my brain since I was born, what you call the 'hormonal markers indicating insomnia'. Doctors tried giving me sedatives to make me sleep, and it just made me sick in different ways. But you've got a drug that means I can go without sleep. Even in the withdrawal case, I would be able to last four or five days before symptoms start building up; and so long as doctors don't try sedatives, those terrible symptoms of withdrawal are just what I'd experience anyway. Come on, you just need to sign a form. It saves my life, and you get your commission. Who loses?"

"I guess. But this will have to go to the board of directors. We aren't even allowed to talk about this stuff. After the trials, all records were deleted. The company needed to wash its hands of this."

"Yeah," Iriña's mum spoke for the first time. As the lawyer in the room, she felt that this was her moment to step in. "Except you had to keep on manufacturing it for the trial subjects who are permanently addicted. And if I understand correctly, it was attempting to destroy the records of those trials that earned your bosses a fifty million dollar fine. There are still notes on your systems, quite apart from the ones that Chad was able to extract and bring to the courts. And the samples that he kept show that you're still; producing the drug on a small scale. It's entirely possible for Dennier-Pfalz-Furchtengöber to supply this drug, and there's already a precedent four years ago showing that it can be considered negligent if the company fails to supply life-saving medication."

"For the addicts, maybe. DPF might have some liability in the case of the drug trials, but..."

"Your company policy says you only supply it to people who are already addicted, right?" Iriña interrupted. "That's the rule? Because Uncle Chad still had some of the intermediary products from the manufacturing process. Enough that anybody with a chemistry set could synthesise a year's supply. I've been taking trivolyxylenol-2,4,4-phenyl-aptomyseclin spirulated synapsidrene since I was three months old, and you said yourself that there's no way a child could survive having supply interrupted for more than a week. What's company policy then?"

"I... uhh... I don't know? I'll have to call legal, but..." the rep stammered, and the doctor quickly showed him into an inner office where he could make his call.

"You know Chad will probably get in trouble now?" Iriña's dad pointed out. "They'll try to sue him."

"They'll lose," her mum pointed out. "They'd have to show that the company was harmed, and I'm sure they won't be losing money on the prescription. Any other grounds the hippocratic oath will give some protection; he was doing what's best for the patient. The most they could realistically claim is compensatory damages for the pills she's been taking for the last year. They might get the money we should have paid for those, if they'd been willing to sell them."

"I'd rather not have mentioned it."

"I know. But Chad was aware it might be necessary. And he trusted Iriña to make that decision."

"Did I get it right?" The baby was looking up at them, still worried. For all her intelligence, she was still just a child. Sometimes it was easy to forget, but every time they saw that uncertainty her parents knew there was nothing more important than protecting her.

The drug company representative returned after a tense twenty minutes, and said that the baby could go on living. It would cost a lot, but that was a price they were willing to pay. So long as doctors always saw the bracelet she was wearing, she had won the chance of a full life; and her parents would ensure that she was always treated with respect.