By Morgan Jarema
The Grand Rapids Press

Three On The Edge
by John Kelly
Bantam Books
copyright 1999
$24.95
304 pages

Imagine you're a 14-year-old with a sore knee that turns out to be bone cancer. Nine months in the hospital and all the other children there who have what you have are dead.

Imagine you are the middle child of five sisters. Your mother died of breast cancer when you were five years old. Your oldest sister gets it after her second child is born. Then it's your turn.

Imagine you're a doctor in charge of clinical trials for a new AIDS drug, and dying patients who do not qualify are pleading with you to let them in. Since the drug already has been proven to work, the truth of your job in the trials is clear: you decide who lives and who dies.

Imagine no more.

Writer John Kelly takes readers to the very brink of a trio of emotional cliffs in his first solo-authored book, "Three On The Edge."

Kelly's book details what three patients go through as they enter the labyrinth world of clinical trials and experimental procedures.

"A few have to suffer in order that the many can be helped. It is the necessary but awful price of medical progress," he writes.

"Three On The Edge" is a tribute to all those who have sacrificed days, months and years of their lives sitting in hospitals as human guinea pigs.

As Kelly notes, demographers estimate that somewhere between 69 and 110 billion people have walked the earth so far. One expert guesses that just 6 to 7 billion have left behind even an inkling of their existence.

The characters in Kelly's book, all of whom are real, have left more than an inkling. Their participation in the new drug trials and procedures detailed in the book essentially has allowed others to live.

"How many of us can say that we made that kind of difference with our lives?" Kelly asks.