Lab Girl (25 page)

AGRONOMISTS AND FORESTERS
have charted the growth of hundreds of plant species, starting in 1879 when a German scientist noticed that the increasing weight of a corn plant, when graphed against the days of its development, resulted in a line with a curious lazy-S shape. These scientists had weighed their potted plants daily, and for the entire first month they saw very little growth. Then, during the second month, the plants' weights shot up sharply; they doubled in size each week until they reached their maxima at three months of age. The scientists were then surprised to see the weights drop off again, and by the time they began to flower and produce seed, the plants weighed only about 80 percent of what they had been at their largest. This scientific result was enduring, and the many thousand corn plants that have been charted since then have all shown a similar lazy-S curve. We don't know exactly how it works, but a corn plant knows what it is supposed to be, even though it meanders along the way.

Other plants display very different growth curves. The curve describing the development of the leaves on wheat resembles your pulse: a brief throb of growth that settles back into decline. The curve for a sugar beet also shows increase followed by decline; however, the curve makes a long, low arc centered on the summer solstice. The curve for the nuisance grass
Phragmites
looks like a pyramid: birth and growth symmetrically bracketed by decay and death. Such curves are invaluable in the farm field or in the forest, where harvesting food or wood is a distant goal. By approximating the position of growing plants along these standard growth curves, one can guess a good date for harvest, and by extension, pencil in the possible payday associated with it.

The growth curves of trees are diffuse and sprawling compared with the curves for smaller plants, as they extend for hundreds of years instead of for just one season. Each tree species is subject to its own unique curve. Monterey pine grows twice as fast as Norway spruce, but both trees are harvested for papermaking when they are of similar girth. As a result, Norwegian paper companies are more likely to be solvent and generally own larger territories than their American counterparts.

Within the forest, the variation in stature among trees of the same age is far larger than it is for other organisms, including animals. Within the United States, the tallest ten-year-old boy is about 20 percent taller than the shortest ten-year-old boy. This same differential holds for five-year-old boys as well as for twenty-year-old men: the tallest is about 20 percent taller than the shortest. Within a pine forest, the thickest ten-year-old trunk is about four times thicker than the thinnest ten-year-old trunk. This same differential holds for twenty-year-old trees as well as for fifty-year-old trees: the thickest trunk is about four times thicker than the thinnest. It turns out that there is no “right” or “wrong” way to grow into a hundred-year-old tree: there are only ways that work and ways that do not.

Becoming a tree is a long journey, and so even the most experienced botanist cannot look at a twig on a sapling and accurately describe what kind of branch it might develop into over the next fifty years. Plant growth curves can be useful for guessing, but it is important to remember that they don't show us the future, only the past. They are improvised lines, drawn through data that was collected for plants that are mostly dead by now. The datasets that define these curves are not static, and every time a new plant is measured it can be added to the graph. Each new data point changes the overall pattern slightly and thus alters the growth curve. There is no way to mathematically predict the shape of these curves, even with the massive computers that can lately be brought to bear. Nothing in these growth curves tells us what a tree should look like, only what trees have looked like. Every plant must find its own unique path to maturity.

There are botany textbooks that contain pages and pages of growth curves, but it is always the lazy-S-shaped ones that confuse my students the most. Why would a plant decrease in mass just when it is nearing its plateau of maximum productivity? I remind them that this shrinking has proved to be a signal of reproduction. As the green plants reach maturity, some of their nutrients are pulled back and repurposed toward flowers and seeds. Production of the new generation comes at a significant cost to the parent, and you can see it in a cornfield, even from a great distance.

BEING PREGNANT IS
by far the hardest thing that I have ever done. I can't breathe, I can't sit down and I can't stand up, I can't put down the tray-table on the airplane, I can't sleep on my stomach, and I've
only
slept on my stomach for the last thirty-four years. I wonder what kind of god in what kind of heaven decided that a hundred-and-ten-pound woman could carry thirty-five pounds of baby. I am compelled to march in endless circles around the neighborhood escorted by Reba, because the baby is quiet only when I am moving. He kicks me not with here-I-am-Mommy playful bops, but in the writhing torture of a man struggling against a straitjacket. I walk and walk and walk some more, a solitary parody of some pagan fertility parade, and I think about how neither I nor the baby is enjoying this suffocating arrangement.

A manic-depressive pregnant woman cannot take Depakote or Tegretol or Seroquel or lithium or Risperdal or any of the other things that she's been taking on a daily basis for years in order to keep herself from hearing voices and banging her head against the wall. Once her pregnancy is confirmed she must cease all medications quickly (another known trigger) and stand on the train tracks just waiting for the locomotive to hit. The statistics are pretty simple: a bipolar woman is seven times as likely to experience a major episode while pregnant, compared with before or after. Leaving her to ride it out without medication for the first two trimesters is the cruel reality upon which doctors insist.

Early in the pregnancy I wake up and vomit violently until I collapse onto the bathroom floor and lie there for hours, retching and crying in exhaustion until finally, in desperation, I begin to hit my head against the walls and the floor, trying to knock myself out. I regress to my child's habit of begging Jesus for help or at least for the mercy of oblivion. Later, when I come to, I can feel a cool film of snot, blood, saliva, and tears between my face and the tile floor, but I cannot speak and I do not know who I am. My steadfast husband, who has been frantically on the phone, comes in and picks me up and washes me off, and calls the doctor again. They take me in and try all the things that they have tried on me before, but in a week I am right back to doing it again. This goes on until Clint and the dog are the only beings in the whole world whom I can recognize by name.

I go to the hospital in earnest and stay for weeks at a time, strapped down when nothing else works, and they put me through countless rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, which make me forget most of 2002. I beg the doctors and nurses to tell me why, why, why this is happening to me, and they do not answer. All of us can do little except count the days until it will be safe for me to take the drugs that I need. Twenty-six weeks is a magic date: it ushers in the third trimester, a period of advanced fetal development for which the Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of a whole series of antipsychotic drugs to address the health of the mother.

As soon as it is medically advisable, I am put on this and that and the other medication regimen, and then slowly my more florid symptoms begin to come under control. I begin to drag myself into work, often just to spend the day sleeping on the floor of my office. I try but find myself too weak to teach, and so I put myself on medical leave. One morning during my eighth month, I trudge through the front door of the building and stop to rest in the front office while mentally preparing to drag this extra thirty pounds down to my laboratory in the basement. I don't handle any chemicals, of course, but it comforts me to sit next to the humming machines and examine the readouts as they are produced, and pretend that the instruments need my approval and encouragement in order to continue with each next task.

In preparation for my difficult journey down in the elevator, I sit on one of the visitor's chairs next to the photocopier and lean back behind my huge abdomen. I announce, “I think I get it now. This is the new me. He is never coming out. Eighteen years from now I will have a grown man living inside my body,” and although I don't really mean it as a joke, the secretaries chuckle in sympathy.

Walter, the head of the department, walks in, and I automatically stand up, like a soldier coming to attention in the presence of a senior officer. I am close to being the first and only woman ever awarded tenure in this hundred-year-old ivy-draped department at Hopkins, and I instinctively know that I should hide any physical weakness that accompanies my pregnant state.

Unfortunately, I've stood up too quickly and the blood rushes from my head and I feel faint. I automatically sit down and put my head between my legs, knowing that this will pass in a minute or so. This light-headedness is familiar because I have always been plagued by low blood pressure and tend to be resistant toward eating, viewing it as an endlessly recurring chore. Walter looks around in puzzlement, and at me in the middle of it all having assumed the posture of a beached and prostrate whale. He goes into his office and closes the door. Someone offers me a cup of water, but I refuse it. I limp to the elevator burdened by a new nagging worry that I can't quite put my finger on.

The next day at about six-thirty in the evening, Clint comes into my office, which is located just down the hall from his own. His face is drawn in such a way that I wonder if he has come to tell me that someone has died. He leans on the doorframe and says gravely, “Listen, Walter came into my office today.” He pauses, looking pained. “He told me that you can't come into the building anymore while you are on medical leave.”

“What?” I cry out, more terrified than angry. “How can they
do
that? It's
my
lab; I
built
that place—”

“I know, I know…,” sighs my husband. “They're assholes.” But he says it gently, to soothe me too.

“I didn't know they could do
this,
” I respond as the hurt starts to sink in. “
Why?
Did he say
why
?” I ask, and the many, many times in my life when I have pleaded this question
“Why?”
to those in power come back to me, as does the fact that I have never, ever been given an answer that's good enough for me.

“Oh, some bullshit about liability and insurance,” he answered, and then continued, “They're cavemen. We
knew
that.”

I begin ranting, “What the fuck? Half of these guys are drunk in their offices…and hitting on students…and
I'm
the liability?”

“Listen, here's the reality. They don't want to look at a pregnant woman, and you're the only one who has ever set foot in this building. They can't deal. It's simple,” he says softly, and his anger is calmer than mine.

Part of me is still flabbergasted. “He told
you
to tell
me
? Why didn't he come and tell
me
himself?”

“He's afraid of you, is my guess. They're all cowards.”

I shake my head and clench my teeth. “No, no,
no
!” I insist.

“Hope, we can't
do
anything about this,” he says quietly, wretchedly. “He's the
boss.
” Clint is wearing the same soul-worried look that I once saw on a magnificent and ancient elephant that had lost its mate of thirty years. He knows how much it hurts me to be banned from my own lab, from the place where I feel happy and safe—especially now—and from the only place that I truly regard as home.

In frustration I grab my empty coffee cup and hurl it to the floor with all my might. It bounces on the carpet and does not break but instead rocks itself into a smug and leisurely sideways pose. In it I see yet more evidence of my powerlessness, even over things small and meaningless, and I sit down, put my head in my hands, and sob onto my desk.

“I don't want this anymore,”
I choke out while practically keening, and Clint stands and witnesses my pain, and the weight on his heart doubles, and doubles again. After my crying has abated, we sit together in silence and sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.

Two years later Clint would tell me that all his affection for Hopkins died on that day, and that he had never forgiven them for hurting me. We talked about it with the benefit of distance and hindsight—how it probably was just for liability reasons and nobody's fault—but then we stood together, joined hands, gathered all of our loved ones and a few of our belongings, and moved thousands of miles away. And yet again I built up my lab from zero, with Bill at the middle of it. But on the day that I throw my coffee cup, I cry because I can see only what I am losing and not what I will gain, which is hidden from me by my two-inch-thick uterus.

After I am banned from the department, I am at loose ends during the day, so I schedule my prenatal visits for the morning. I show up and the nurses and techs weigh me and ultrasound me and deliver the astounding news that I am one week more pregnant than I was one week ago. Strangers ask me how many “months along” I am, and when I answer “eleven” they expect me to laugh with them, but I fail even in this small thing.

I know that I am supposed to be happy and excited. I am supposed to be shopping and painting and talking lovingly to the baby inside me. I am supposed to celebrate the ripening fruit of love and luxuriate in the fullness of my womb. But I don't do any of this. Instead I grieve long and hard for the part of my life that is over now that this baby has come. I should revel in expectation, and daydream in circles about the mysterious identity of this person coming together inside me. But I don't, because I already know him. From the first, I sensed that he would be a boy, and I knew he would have blond hair and blue eyes like his father.

I understood that he would have my father's name and his own personality. That he would be as hardy as all Viking men and women are, and that he will justifiably hate me for being an unfit mother, that part of me having grown up under too much shade and wizened without flowering properly. I breathe in and out, I drink gallons of milk and eat buckets of spaghetti and sleep many hours each day, and I try to focus on the fact that I am at least sharing my rich blood with him, passively giving him what he needs, for now. I try not to think about my troubled mind. I try not to wonder when will be the next time that I lose my mind.

I sit in a waiting room with fifteen-year-old pregnant girls, each facing a wall of trouble much taller than mine, but I am numb to the gratitude that this should inspire. I am so sad that I cannot cry, and so empty that I cannot pray. The doctor calls me in and I notice that she is not wearing earrings. Neither am I. I reflect incongruously on the relative rarity with which I meet a woman who is not wearing earrings.

“Well, you're pretty big, but otherwise you're right where you should be,” she announces, looking at my chart. “The baby's heartbeat is strong, and your blood sugar is normal. This is almost over,” she says, and she looks at me hard. She hands me some pamphlets and asks, “Have you thought about contraception for after the birth? I suppose that you know that you can get pregnant even if you are breast-feeding.”

My mind spins. This last stage of pregnancy has been positively surreal. Acquaintances ask me when I will have my second kid. Doctors prod me toward contraception. How bizarre to question a woman who can't even picture herself with one baby about the logistics (or not) of a second.

I stammer confusedly, “I don't think I can breast-feed. I mean, I have to work, and if I need medication or something—”

“It's okay,” my doctor interrupts. “He will grow fine on formula. I am not worried about that.”

Her forgiveness for the very first of my failures toward this baby is so automatic and freely given that it pierces me. I feel the old childish hope involuntarily stirred, that perhaps this woman cares and understands. After all, she has my chart. Maybe she noticed all the ECT and hospital stays and medications. Then I catch myself and listlessly wonder again for which of my sins I am being punished. I am sick to death of this wound that will not close; of how my babyish heart mistakes any simple kindness from a woman for a breadcrumb trail leading to the soft love of a mother or the fond approval of a grandmother. I am tired of carrying this dull orphan-pain, for though it has lost its power to surprise, every season it still reaps its harvest of hurt.
This woman is my doctor; she is not my mother,
I tell myself firmly, and I am humiliated in my need, even to myself. More immediate is the fact that someone somewhere who makes the schedules has already decreed that we have exactly twelve minutes for each other.

After we confirm my next appointment, I leave the doctor's office. On my way out, I go into the bathroom and I vomit and shake, and afterward I don't recognize the person in the mirror. She looks so sad and tired and greasy that I feel sorry for her, even before I fully understand that she is me.

After five o'clock, when everyone in the building has gone home for the day, I take Reba and sneak into the lab. I cannot do anything productive, but I instinctively resist the cruelty of my department chair's order by staging a sort of one-woman pregnant sit-in. When Bill walks in at seven-thirty, returning from his first meal of the day, to find me sitting in the dark, I hastily rub my face in order to hide the fact that I've been unable to stop crying. He turns on all the lights and systematically begins to update me on each of our projects, reciting a detailed status for each one, a long, comforting litany providing concrete evidence that everything is actually okay. He is exhausted from doing both of our jobs, but the rockier the ground, the harder he pulls the plow.

He doesn't know exactly what's been wrong with me or why I've been so absent. Neither do my friends or family, such as I have. And no one asks. I suppose that my lineage has been hiding the crazy for so many generations that my secrecy on these matters was genetically hardwired.