Jungle Up, page 37
Several hours later, when we arrived back at base camp, everything was gone. The place had been packed up and cleared out. We were setting up our tents to make a camp of our own when we heard the thwack of an approaching helicopter.
Holland had been watching the GPS beacons he’d made Diego, Andy, Darnell, and me attach to our packs and had instructed the helicopter pilot to make one last trip to pull us out.
When Holland asked where Rix was, we explained how Rix had been shot, and that he was still recuperating in the village. A week later, Holland would take another helicopter flight to the village and have Rix airlifted out. Rix would spend two days in a hospital in Guayaramerín, but he would heal up nicely, and according to Andy, Rix had recently joined his TAFLS partner in the jungles of Madagascar to assist on their latest project.
The helicopter dropped us in Riberalta, where I said goodbye to Diego. I told him that I hoped to see him again someday, though part of me hoped I wouldn’t.
At least not in Bolivia.
I’d expected Vern to join us on the flight back to La Paz, but he said he was staying in Riberalta for a few more days. He had a twinkle in his eye, and although I couldn’t be certain, I think it had something to do with his missing maroon hat. I had a feeling that wherever it was in that jungle, it was marking something.
Maybe it was the golden jaguar that Daniel had lost. Or maybe it was something even more valuable.
Anyhow, after a quick flight back to La Paz, Andy, Darnell, Gina, and I spent two nights at the Hotel Presidente where the remainder of the expedition team was also staying.
I was surprised when we walked through the hotel entrance and found Libby waiting in the lobby. When Andy came through the doors, she ran to him and pulled him into a tight hug.
Couldn’t say I saw that coming.
Good for him.
Gina and I made haste to Jonathan Roth’s hotel room, which he wouldn’t be needing. After a long shower, then some adult hugging, we curled up on the king bed and slept for twelve straight hours.
We spent the next day ordering room service and sleeping more, then we boarded the charter flight back to Miami, which had already been paid for.
In Miami, Gina and I said goodbye to Libby and Andy. But we hadn’t seen the last of them.
Yes, we.
The clinic where Gina had worked two years earlier was in desperate need of a general practitioner, and after spending nearly all of September getting reacquainted—very well reacquainted—with each other’s bodies, Gina returned to work in early October.
Two weeks in, Gina came home from work and said that she had two different patients during the day who were most likely suffering from autoimmune disease.
On that topic, the superbacteria, or autobiotic, that Daniel discovered had successfully made its way back to the States. (Nathan Buxton included its discovery in his National Geographic article that came out in mid-October, and the term autobiotic had been trending on Twitter for the past few months.) Daniel and Belippa had been testing the bacteria, which Daniel named Bacillus trishellae after his mother, Trisha, on animals and they were moving into human trials in the next few months. And astonishingly enough, Patrick, Daniel, and Belippa were sharing all their proprietary research with other pharmaceutical companies.
True to his word, Patrick cut drug costs across the board at Belippa by more than 500 percent. He lobbied for other pharmaceutical companies to do the same, and surprisingly, a few of them did. He was also pushing for fair drug-pricing legislation in Washington, DC.
That November, I received a package in the mail from Patrick Sewall.
Inside were three large containers of what looked like vitamin gummies. But they weren’t. They were the first autobiotics. Attached was a note:
These are the first autobiotics off the line. Won’t be FDA approved for another year, but I wanted to get some to your sister. Thanks again for saving my sorry ass. Best to Gina.
—Patrick
I shipped them to Lacy the next day.
Six weeks later, when Lacy went to her neurologist’s office, for the first time in seven years she had a negative ANA test.
Lacy wouldn’t go as far as to say she was cured, but she did say that she’d never felt better. She was tapering off her other drugs and had high hopes that at some point she’d be medication free. Most importantly, she hadn’t had a single flare-up since taking her first autobiotic gummy.
I couldn’t have been happier.
Literally.
I would have spent seven years in the Bolivian jungle if it had meant giving Lacy even a chance of beating her disease.
“You just got an email from Andy!” Gina shouted from where she was hovering over a laptop in the kitchen. From over her shoulder I could see the picture I’d taken from her hut—the one of me on the toilet with my Game Boy—stuck to the refrigerator.
“Open it,” I said.
A moment later, she clapped her hands together several times and said, “It’s a rough cut of the documentary.”
After arriving back in the States, Andy had quit his job teaching, and he and Libby had been working diligently to piece together the documentary. At the beginning of October, the two came to visit, staying with us for three days. When the four of us weren’t drinking wine and playing board games, Gina and I spent hours being interviewed for the documentary.
I joined Gina at the laptop and read Andy’s email:
Hey guys,
Libby and I finally finished piecing together the rough cut. Can’t thank you enough for sitting for all those interviews. Anyhow, let me know what you think. Hoping to get the film done and into the Sundance Film Festival next year. If so, you and Gina should join us there.
FYI . . . I sent the rough cut to Martin a few days ago and he signed off on it.
Later gators,
Andy
P.S. Roth didn’t delete the scenes of you in your birthday suit and thinking you were on Naked and Afraid. For Gina’s reviewing pleasure, I left them in. :)
Gina slapped my butt and said, “I’ll make the popcorn.”
Author’s Note
I always knew Thomas and Gina were destined to end up together, but I wasn’t certain how they were going to rekindle their relationship. The answer came to me while I was reading Douglas Preston’s book, The Lost City of the Monkey God. The true story follows a documentary expedition (which Preston was a part of, writing for National Geographic) as they head into the Mosquitia jungle of Honduras in search of the lost city of the Monkey God. That’s when I first started to play with the idea of Gina Brady being abducted from her Bolivian village and Thomas having to join up with a documentary expedition to save her.
A few Google searches later and I learned about the Incas and Paititi.
For the next few months, as I absorbed innumerable books, movies, documentaries, and articles about the Amazon jungle, three distinctive themes emerged: people in search of lost ruins in the Amazon, people in search of new medicines/drugs in the Amazon, and people in search of other people who had gone missing in the Amazon.
From there, the story started to take shape, but I still needed that special twist.
There is always one moment (at least in my experience) of pure book magic that happens in the creation of a story. This moment happened when I was researching what pharmaceutical drugs were the most profitable. The list I found was from 2017, and the number one top-selling drug was Humira (AbbVie, 2017 sales: $18.4 billion), the number four top-selling drug was Enbrel (Amgen & Pfizer, 2017 sales: $7.9 billion), and the number seven top-selling drug was Remicade (Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co, 2017 sales: $7.2 billion.) There was one thing all three of these medications had in common: they all treated autoimmune disease.
I then researched a list of autoimmune diseases and there it was among the many others, the very disease that Thomas’s sister suffers from: Multiple sclerosis.
Pure book magic :)
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I took substantial literary license with Incas, Paititi, Bolivia, the Amazon jungle, dengue fever, documentary filmmaking, anthropology, archaeology, ethnobotany, cancer, autoimmune disease, and countless other story elements. Any errors or omissions in the story are mine and mine alone.
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I could never have written this book or reached the finish line without the help of an extraordinary group of people.
Special thanks to author Douglas Preston, whose book The Lost City of the Monkey God became a roadmap for my fictitious documentary expedition.
Enormous thanks to archaeologist Chris Fisher, PhD—who was part of the Monkey God expedition in Honduras and just happens to be a professor at my alma mater, Colorado State University—for sharing his time, expertise, and friendship. Chris is currently undertaking an unprecedented scientific effort to lidar scan the entire surface of the Earth. (You can learn more at www.TheEarthArchive.com.)
My thanks to ethnobotanist and author Mark J. Plotkin, PhD. I relied heavily on his incredible book Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest.
A big, warm thank-you to my first reader, my mom, who read the book no less than five times and provided invaluable insights and recommendations with each draft.
A heartfelt thanks to my beta readers, Nelda Hirsh, Kari Miller, and Dori Rauschenberger, who each made invaluable contributions to the story.
Special thanks to Dana Isaacson. This was my first experience working with a developmental editor, and I am beyond grateful for Dana’s fantastic suggestions.
My sincere thanks to my literary team, Danny Baror and Heather Baror, for their diligence and for finding a home for the Thomas Prescott series.
Many thanks to the team at Blackstone Publishing, including Rick Bleiweiss (for believing in my books), Megan Wahrenbrock (for helping shepherd me through the process), Lauren Maturo (for cheerleading my talents), Zena Kanes (for her brilliant artwork), and Michael Krohn (for his sensational line editing and research).
And to you, my readers, my deepest thanks for turning the pages and letting me live out my dreams.
God is love.
Nick
South Lake Tahoe
January 2021
Nick Pirog, Jungle Up
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