hotel the next morning, making sure to fast to ensure the most
accurate readings. The Theranos wellness center inside the Walgreens
wasn’t much to behold: it was a little room not much bigger than a
closet with a chair and little bottles of water. Unlike Safeway, the
pharmacy chain hadn’t spent a fortune remodeling its stores to create
upscale clinics. I sat down and waited for a few minutes while the
phlebotomist entered my order into a computer and talked to someone
on the phone. After she hung up, she asked me to lift up my shirtsleeve
and wrapped a tourniquet around my arm. Why no finger stick? I
asked. She replied that some of the tests in my order required a venous
draw. I wasn’t entirely surprised. Alan Beam had explained to me that,
of the more than 240 tests Theranos offered on its menu, only about
80 were performed on small finger-stick samples (a dozen on the
Edison and another 60 or 70 on the hacked Siemens machines). The
rest, he’d said, required what Holmes had likened in media interviews
to a medieval torture mechanism: the dreaded hypodermic needle. I
now had my confirmation of that. After walking out of the Walgreens,
I drove my rental car to a nearby LabCorp site and submitted to
another blood draw. Dr. Sundene promised to send me both sets of
results when they arrived. Come to think of it, she would get herself
tested at both places too, to broaden our comparative sample, she said.
I spent the next few days knocking on the doors of other doctors’
offices. At a practice in Scottsdale, I talked to Drs. Adrienne Stewart,
Lauren Beardsley, and Saman Rezaie. Dr. Stewart described a patient
of hers who had postponed a long-planned trip to Ireland at the last
minute because of a test result from Theranos suggesting she might
have deep vein thrombosis, a condition that occurs when a blood clot
forms, usually in the legs. People with DVT aren’t supposed to fly
because of the risk the clot will break loose, travel through the
bloodstream, and lodge in the lungs, causing a pulmonary embolism.
Dr. Stewart had subsequently set aside the Theranos result when
ultrasounds of the patient’s legs and a second set of blood-test results
from another lab had been normal.
The incident had made her leery when Theranos sent her a lab
report for another one of her patients showing an abnormally high