Lab Girl (6 page)

“I don't think I can do this,” I confessed when we got to the courtyard. “This is the most stressful thing I've ever done.”

Lydia chuckled. “You're making way too much out of this. Remember, it ain't brain surgery.”

“Yeah, brain surgery's on the fifth floor.” I completed the joke that the runners told each other at least five times a day. “Still, what if I just can't get it?” I groaned. “Half the time I don't remember if I did something right or wrong.”

Lydia looked around and then leaned forward and spoke. “Listen, I'm gonna tell you something about sterile technique.” She leaned back and continued in a low voice. “Now, don't go licking the needle or anything, but if you've got something on your hands that's gonna kill them—they're gonna die anyway.” I had no answer for that, and Lydia seemed to think that she'd explained what needed to be explained, and so we sat in silence while she smoked.

After a while I rubbed my temples and said, “Man, I've got a headache. Lydia, don't you ever worry about what breathing all this alcohol is doing to our lungs?”

Lydia had a cigarette hanging out of her mouth at the time, and the look she gave me showed that she now had proof that I was terminally stupid. She took a long, long drag and then answered while exhaling. “What do you think?”

Right after we got back from break, I threw myself into the fray and drew out an order for a complicated chemotherapy bag, determined to make good on what was left of my first day in the laboratory. I made the bag accurately and was very proud of myself until an enraged Pharm.D. walked up to me and held a tiny bottle of precious interferon an inch from my face.

“You just
wasted
this entire bottle,” she hissed with fury. A few minutes before that, I had injected the valuable immunity promoter and then removed the bottle from my workspace without sealing it, thus contaminating the remainder of the supply. In one stroke I had wasted at least a thousand dollars of the medication, and also created a big paperwork problem. I felt a rush of shame such as I hadn't experienced since I was a little girl getting caught reading on the wrong page by yet another teacher who was sick and tired of dealing with me. As the protagonist of my own private chapter seven,
I looked up with a flush upon my face and remorse in my heart.

Lydia, smelling opportunity, stepped in and assured the steaming Pharm.D., “She just needs a break—she hasn't had a break all day. C'mon, kiddo, let's go.” She led me to the courtyard, and we commenced our umpteenth break for that very shift.

When we got there, I sat down and put my head in my hands. “If I get fired, I don't know what I'll do,” I said, hiccupping as tears threatened.

“Fired? Is
that
what you think?” Lydia cackled. “Jesus, relax. I've never seen anybody get fired from this hellhole. In case you haven't noticed, long before people get fired, they quit.”

“I can't quit,” I confessed with anguish. “I need the money.”

Lydia lit a cigarette and took a long drag while looking at me. “Yep,” she said sadly, “you and me are the type that can't quit.” She waved her pack of Winston Lights toward me and I declined for the sixth time that day.

When Lydia dropped me off at my apartment later that night, I asked her what she sat and thought about during those long hours when we worked silently in the pharmacy.

She considered the question for a moment, and then answered, “My ex-husband.”

“Let me guess,” I ventured, “he's in prison?”

“He
wishes,
” she snorted. “Bastard lives in Iowa.”

As we sat there and laughed at a joke that's as old as Minnesota itself, chapter seven echoed in my head:
miserable little dogs, we laugh, with our visages as white as ashes, and our hearts sinking into our boots.

When the medication orders slowed down in the pharmacy and I was tired of sitting, I would go and visit the blood bank to see if they wanted me to carry some pints over to the emergency room. This afforded me the opportunity to burn off some energy, since there was always a lot of time for pacing while waiting for the number and type of blood units to be verified repeatedly by all parties.

The lifer who worked the three-to-eleven shift behind the counter was named Claude, and while not as ancient as Lydia, he still qualified as a senior citizen in my eyes, having arrived at the ripe old age of twenty-eight. Claude fascinated me, both because he was the only person I'd ever met who had been to jail and because he was easily one of the most harmlessly nice guys I'd ever known. His hard life had left him physically the worse for wear, but he didn't seem to harbor any resentment, and I supposed this was because his attention span was so short and shallow. Working the blood desk was hands down the easiest job at the hospital, Claude had boasted to me with a sort of confused pride.

Claude explained that there were only three things that he had to remember how to do: thaw blood, check blood, and dump blood. Claude began each shift by wheeling several pallets, each stacked high with bricklike bags of frozen blood, out of the deep freeze and into the plus-five-degree room to thaw. Immediately after it was donated and processed, the blood had been frozen and stored, and now it had to thaw slowly in order to be usable. By moving the blood, Claude was preparing the stash that would be available for use three shifts hence. The next thing Claude did was to man the counter for about seven hours, waiting for someone to come down with a blood order. Before signing anything out, he had to check and double-check the blood type on the bags against the order form, and sometimes call the operating theaters to double-check. He explained to me that there were “at least four or six” different types of blood and that sending off the wrong type “could waste it by killing somebody,” and it troubled me that the two consequences were not entirely discrete within his mind.

When Claude slammed down the limp yellowy bags of blood plasma in bundles of three, I couldn't help but think of the butcher shops that lined the Main Street of my hometown, and particularly of the meat counters where Mr. Knauer whumped down whatever my mother's note requested before sending me back home to help administer dinner to my family. Near the end of his shift, it was Claude's job to discard any unused thawed bags, which amounted to gallons and gallons of blood, down the hazardous-materials chute, where they would be incinerated along with the rest of the day's medical rubbish. It seemed a waste to me, and I commented on what a shame it was that good-hearted citizens had gone out of their way to donate the blood that he was heaving by the armload into the Dumpster.

“Don't feel too bad,” Claude said with genuine sensitivity. “It's mostly just bums doing it for the cookie.”

The guys at the blood bank were infamous for hitting on pharmacy runners, so I wasn't particularly flattered when Claude developed a crush on me. “When I heard that bunch of ambulances come in I started hoping that I would see you down here,” he told me one day when I arrived with an order, prompting me to mention my fictitious art-student boyfriend, whom I had mentally rendered in detail for use on just such occasions.

“If you've got a boyfriend, why are you working here?” Claude asked, and it dawned on me that his understanding of the relationship between the sexes was undoubtedly deeper than mine. I made the excuse that artists are generally penniless, even when they are gorgeous and wear a sort of troubled look strikingly reminiscent of a certain photograph of Ted Williams at bat during the 1941 All-Star Game.

“Oh, so he needs you to buy pot for him,” Claude said with what might or might not have been sarcasm, and I couldn't think of a comeback with which to defend my imaginary boyfriend, so I let it slide.

I took to working the 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. shift and made a point of being there on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, to shoot and then deliver a cart of “drop bags” to the psychiatric ward. These were saline-based intravenous medications containing a sedative called droperidol, to be used as anesthesia during electroconvulsive therapy, known by caregivers as “ECT” and misunderstood by the public to be “shock treatments.” Twice a week, patients were readied in the early-morning hours and settled onto gurneys, and then lined up in the hallway to wait their turn for the procedure. One by one, each patient was drawn into a quiet room where a team of doctors and nurses administered electrical stimulation to one side of the head while carefully monitoring vital signs; all the while the patient was awash in the anesthesia I had brought.

Accordingly, Wednesdays and Fridays were noticeably better days in the ward, when many of the patients who had previously seemed dead in all but body could be found sitting up, dressed in their street clothes. Some could even briefly look me in the eye. In contrast, Sundays and Mondays were the worst days in the ward, when patients rocked and scratched themselves or moaned while lying in bed, cared for by nurses who seemed both supremely capable and acutely helpless.

The first time that I entered through the double-locked doors of the psych ward I was terrified, believing for no real reason that such places harbored evil souls ready to assault me at any moment. But once inside I found it to be the slowest-moving place on Earth, and I saw that these patients were unique only in that time had stopped inside their wounds, which were seemingly never to heal. The pain was so thick and palpable in the psych ward that a visitor could breathe it like the heavy humidity of summer air, and I soon realized that the challenge would not be to defend myself from patients, but to defend myself against my own increasing indifference toward them. What originally struck me as cryptic in chapter fifty-nine was now mundane:
they are turned inward, to feed upon their own hearts, and their own hearts are very bad feeding.

After a few months in the hospital lab, I became really good at shooting bags, to the extent that I could keep up with Lydia and even outstrip her at times. Eventually the Pharm.D.'s double-checking quit turning up errors in my work, and soon afterward, my confidence ripened into boredom. I challenged myself by developing time-saving rituals for everything from how I lined up my medications to the number of steps I took while walking to the Teletype. I studied the names on each label and began to recognize the sicker patients who required the same mixtures day after day. I started shooting the tiny bags that required complicated dilutions, made for infants born prematurely and bearing stickers that read only “Baby Boy Jones” or “Baby Girl Smith” where there would otherwise have been a full name.

Occasionally I was handed a “cut slip,” printed from a second, quieter Teletype, which informed the pharmacy when a patient requiring medication had died, so that the order was no longer needed. If a Pharm.D. tapped me on the shoulder and presented me with a cut slip, I stood up, walked to the sink, slashed or “cut” the bag that I was shooting and poured it out, and then grabbed a new order on the way back to my chair. One day I got a cut slip for a chemotherapy bag that I was making for a patient whose name I was in the habit of searching out from the pile daily. I stopped and looked around. Somehow I felt I had a simple sort of respects to pay, but who would want them?

Slowly I went from believing that I was doing the most important work in the world to ruminating over how pointless it was to be part of a pharmaceutical chain gang producing a mule train of medications to be hauled upstairs every hour of every day forever without end. From this darker perspective, the hospital was a place where you confined a sick person and then pumped medication through him until he died or got better, and it was not more complicated than that. I couldn't cure anybody. I could follow a recipe and wait to see what happened.

Just as I reached the peak of my disenchantment, one of my professors offered me a long-term work-study position in his research laboratory, and all at once I was assured of the money that I needed to keep me in college until I got my degree. So I quit my hospital job and gave up on saving other people's lives. Instead, I started working in a research laboratory in order to save my own life. To save myself from the fear of having to drop out and from then being bodily foreclosed upon by some boy back home. From the small-town wedding and the children who would follow, who would have grown to hate me as I vented my frustrated ambitions on them. Instead, I would take a long, lonely journey toward adulthood with the dogged faith of the pioneer who has realized that there is no promised land but still holds out hope that the destination will be someplace better than here.

On the same day that I gave my notice to the human resources office at the hospital, I sat through my break with Lydia. While she smoked, she explained to me that I should never buy a Chevrolet because they just wouldn't run reliably for a woman driver. She had always stuck with Fords and had yet to have one completely crap out on her. During a pause, I shared with Lydia that I'd gotten a better-paying job and that I was quitting the pharmacy. True, I'd been working in the hospital for barely six months, but I had begun to see it clearly for what it was. This place was a hellhole, I had realized, just as she had been telling me since the first day I met her.

I augured grandly that someday I would have my own research lab that would be even bigger than the one I was leaving for, and I wouldn't hire anyone who didn't care as deeply about the work as I did myself. I completed my speech in a little crescendo of self-importance from chapter ten: it was inevitable that I would be
working with a better heart in my own house…than I could in anybody else's now.

I knew that she had heard me, and so I was surprised when she just looked away and took a drag on her cigarette instead of responding. After a moment, she tapped the ash off and continued talking about cars, picking up exactly where she had left off. After we both got off work at 11:00 p.m., I waited around for a bit, but then started toward my apartment on foot.