"Outbreak"

While we're in the depths of this current Chinese Far Eastern Asian Wuhan Not-From-Here Coronavirus pandemic, I dredged up an old memory you might enjoy reliving with me.  And if not, you certainly can't beat the price of participation (no refunds offered).  

I happened to answer the phone personally that day way back in early 1995.  

Normally one of our office staff would have done so, but they were busy.  So I answered.  And to my surprise, a gentleman on the other end of the phone was calling me from Warner Bros.  It seems his Special Effects Office had heard that my company, Nephronics, might own a certain type of medical equipment he was seeking.  A Cobe plasmapheresis machine, to be more precise.  In fact, I told the guy, I had several of them, as we used them often in our business.  Confused yet?

Along with my Registered Nurse wife, Elaine, I started Nephronics back in 1977.  And by '95 we'd grown remarkably.  Nephronics, if you don't know, and many of you do, provided mobile acute hemodialysis and plasmapheresis treatments on-site at smaller, community-level hospitals in Orange and Los Angeles Counties.  We offered such care so that patients needn't be transferred to other, often distant hospitals to achieve treatment.  Rather than boring you with the gory details, in short, we "peed" for other people...

We'd bring a portable machine, necessary supplies and a damn-fine R.N. to perform specialized, often life saving treatments at bedside.  We invented the specialty, and were very good at it.  And we became rather well known by so doing.    

So back to the phone call.   This guy said that WB was shooting a film called "Outbreak," and a scene in it required a Cobe Model 3 machine such as mine.  He said the script had been written that way and that my machine was absolutely necessary.  He then went on to say he really wanted to rent it from me.  While I was still processing what this guy was saying, he went on to offer me what he said was WB's standard rental fee of $1,500 a week.  

Gulp!  

Now, lemme' tell you that $1,500 back in '95 was a whole lotta' money.  It still is, as a matter of fact, but 25 years ago it was a small fortune.  So, after considering this guy's offer for, oh, like a nanosecond, I gave him an emphatic affirmative! 

The next morning bright and early a yuuuuuuge black, 18-wheeler showed up at the back of my business.  Painted on each side were 6 foot-tall, full color versions of Sylvester and Tweetie-Bird.  Surreal.  We loaded up the machine and I signed the agreement.  Off he and his cartoon characters went, my machine in tow.   

I heard nothing for about three weeks.  Then, the phone rang once again.  It was my contact at WB.  He said they were about to shoot the scene and, guess what, nobody knew how to operate my machine!  (Duh!)  So, he offered to hire one of my technical guys to drive to Hollywood "stat" and show them how to use it.  I tapped Jim D., one of my longest and most faithful teammates, for that task.  For $50 an hour Jim would likely have been willing to stomp warm puppies to death.  But mingling with film stars like Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman and Renee Russo, and getting paid bigly for it, was for sure much better duty...

Jim wound up spending three or four days in La La Land, and racked up a cool payday to boot.  BTW, I just thought about it: I was paying him for those days...and he wasn't working.  Maybe I shoulda' got a cut.  Anyway, he and my machine came back home and went back to work.  And none of us thought a thing more until the movie came out, later that same year.

Elaine and I were visiting relatives in New York City around Christmas-time when the premiere hit.  We were first in line at the nearest bijou.  We got some popcorn and found our seats.  We watched with anticipation until, there it was; the last scene in the movie.  They've found the cure to "Ebola" by this time and are performing plasmapheresis blood cleansing treatments on a little Capuchin monkey.  Think back.  You'll recall the scene.  And they're using my machine to do it.  Proud, we were (thanks, Yoda!).  But what we didn't know at the time, was that Jim was kneeling, out of sight, behind the gurney holding the monkey, manually turning the various blood pump handles as furiously as he could so that the red, Kool-aid-like fluid would keep flowing through the bloodlines, looking for all the world like blood.  

And well he did.  I looked carefully but didn't find either Jim's name or my company's in the closing credits.  Oh well, the little people always toil ceaselessly and without due credit while the swells swill Cristal, don't they? 

I always thought I should get into the movies.  I guess I did, in a small kind of way.  Verrrrrrrry small...