Chapter 5: Beat the Clock

“RAMSEY, THIS IS DOCTOR SIMPSON. Do you have a minute to talk?”

“Sure, Doc. Am I late for a checkup?” I sat up straight. There’s nothing to get your attention like having your doctor call out of the blue and say, ‘We need to talk.’ It was a slow news day and I couldn’t figure out why Doc Simpson would call me.

“We’ve had some interesting developments over at the hospital. You’re the only person I know with an eye for real news. It has to do with dropping birthrates. I think we’re onto something. Could you stop by the hospital and meet with a couple of other doctors and me?” Dr. Simpson asked.

“No problem, Doc. Let’s see, I should be able to get clear of here before the donuts arrive, so thirty minutes?”

“I’ll alert them. I’d appreciate it if you keep this under your hat until we’ve had a chance to show you what we have.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour.” I was already out the door before Ed yelled for me. I turned off my cellphone so the buttinski couldn’t reach me. He had a way of messing with contacts and I wasn’t interested in dealing with the office politics.

Dr. Simpson was waiting in the lobby when I walked in and intercepted me before I could inquire at the front desk.

“We’re using a conference room. This isn’t a doctor visit. Not one that your health insurance will be interested in, anyway,” Simpson said. He led me to a small conference room on the second floor where three other doctors waited for us. “Ramsey Smith, this is Bill Gardner, obstetrics, Sandra Reynolds, maternity and fetal specialist, and Levi Ulman, our hospital administrator.”

“Pleased to meet you, doctors. You’ve really got my curiosity up.” At hospital rates, this meeting was costing around a grand an hour. Something had to be serious.

“I’m going to let Levi start the ball rolling,” Simpson said.

The hospital administrator leaned forward. “We didn’t call anyone right away,” he said breathlessly. “I’m not interested in starting a panic where there’s no cause. At first, I thought someone was giving us a bad time on social media so people just weren’t choosing our hospital for their childbirth center. You know we had that whole addition put on the hospital just for taking care of pregnancy and newborns. It was so popular, mothers began booking their delivery time as soon as they found out they were pregnant. Every room booked and every OB-GYN and maternity specialist crunched for time just to meet with the prospective parents.”

I nodded my head. “I can imagine. Seems like we’ve been having a population boom, not a decline in births.”

“It seemed that way until about three months ago. Bill and Sandra both saw their appointment schedules easing up. John specializes in men’s health and his appointments started heating up.”

“I saw an increase in appointments from guys trying to get their wives pregnant,” Dr. Simpson said. “All perfectly healthy. I was making an unprecedented number of referrals to a fertility clinic. And the answer for every one of them was, ‘No motile sperm’.”

“For the hospital, it was the bookings tailing off that was the giveaway. Look at this.” Levi projected a slide from his computer. “This is a graphic display of our delivery schedules. For twelve months prior to this timeline, we were at a hundred percent capacity or more. You can see that carry through up until two months ago. Over the past two months, the number of births in our center has tapered off.”

I’m pretty good at reading charts and graphs and looking for bullshit. You wouldn’t believe what corporations and the government try to prove with charts. Actually, you probably do believe them.

“This is not just a reduction! This says you’ve gone to zero! No births?” That couldn’t be true. Could it?

“That’s right,” Dr. Gardner said. “I do not have a single pregnant woman coming to my office for routine checks. There isn’t an occupied room in the entire childbirth wing of the hospital.”

“I’ve examined all the births during the past two months and have been coordinating my tests with Dr. Pater, our pediatrician. Every birth seemed normal, right up until the moment there were none. There were no more than the usual number of complications for newborns,” Dr. Reynolds said.

“And I can tell you right off, it isn’t because people aren’t trying. Most patients never bring up infertility unless they’ve been trying rigorously for some time,” Simpson said. “My contact at the fertility clinic called me yesterday. He changed labs doing the sperm counts, changed methods of collecting specimens, had every sterile container shipment randomly checked for foreign substances. Nothing changed. A hundred percent of the men he’s seeing have no viable sperm.”

“Every man? Sterile?” I scribbled on my tablet as fast as I could. “I need to check this with some other hospitals and doctors.”

“We did,” Levi Ulman said. “It’s uniform.”

“Then you must have checked with the CDC. Do we have a new virus outbreak? Is there something in the water?”

“There are scarcely any doctors left at the CDC,” Simpson groused. “All we get are spokespersons. They all deny there is any such outbreak. But they are working on a new drug just in case.”

“We don’t usually do things this way,” Ulman continued, “but we can’t get a response from any officials and our only recourse for getting to the bottom of this is to go public. We need to find a cause and stamp it out. And we need to know how widespread the problem is. If it’s limited to the Orlando area, there might be something in the environment that needs cleaned up.”

“Right. No more contact with large talking mice,” I said. “Okay. Doctors, I can’t just run with this story in the morning edition. I need to do some research. As soon as I have some answers, though, I’ll hit the press with it and open a public investigation. May I have a copy of your charts, Dr. Ulman?”

“Yes. I prepared them so you would have something to work with.”

I left the meeting, writing my own bio in my head—it could be used for either my Pulitzer or my obituary—and went home rather than back to the office. I needed privacy to do this research and I wouldn’t get it in the newsroom. I grabbed a sandwich and went to work. As bad a rap as it gets, information is still available on the internet if you know what to look for. The doctors gave me enough to get started.