Lab Girl (4 page)

A SEED KNOWS
how to wait. Most seeds wait for at least a year before starting to grow; a cherry seed can wait for a hundred years with no problem. What exactly each seed is waiting for is known only to that seed. Some unique trigger-combination of temperature-moisture-light and many other things is required to convince a seed to jump off the deep end and take its chance—to take its one and only chance to grow.

A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. Neither the seed nor the old oak is growing; they are both just waiting. Their waiting differs, however, in that the seed is waiting to flourish while the tree is only waiting to die. When you go into a forest you probably tend to look up at the plants that have grown so much taller than you ever could. You probably don't look down, where just beneath your single footprint sit hundreds of seeds, each one alive and waiting. They hope against hope for an opportunity that will probably never come. More than half of these seeds will die before they feel the trigger that they are waiting for, and during awful years every single one of them will die. All this death hardly matters, because the single birch tree towering over you produces at least a quarter of a million new seeds every single year. When you are in the forest, for every tree that you see, there are at least a hundred more trees waiting in the soil, alive and fervently wishing to be.

A coconut is a seed that's as big as your head. It can float from the coast of Africa across the entire Atlantic Ocean and then take root and grow on a Caribbean island. In contrast, orchid seeds are tiny: one million of them put together add up to the weight of a single paper clip. Big or small, most of every seed is actually just food to sustain a waiting embryo. The embryo is a collection of only a few hundred cells, but it is a working blueprint for a real plant with root and shoot already formed.

When the embryo within a seed starts to grow, it basically just stretches out of its doubled-over waiting posture, elongating into official ownership of the form that it assumed years ago. The hard coat that surrounds a peach pit, a sesame or mustard seed, or a walnut's shell mostly exists to prevent this expansion. In the laboratory, we simply scratch the hard coat and add a little water and it's enough to make almost any seed grow. I must have cracked thousands of seeds over the years, and yet the next day's green never fails to amaze me. Something so hard can be so easy if you just have a little help. In the right place, under the right conditions, you can finally stretch out into what you're supposed to be.

After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed (
Nelumbo nucifera
) and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell. And then one day this little plant's yearning finally burst forth within a laboratory. I wonder where it is right now.

Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.

THE FIRST TIME
I performed an experiment that wasn't a rote classroom exercise I was nineteen, and I did it because I wanted the money.

I must have held ten different jobs while I was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. For the entirety of the four years that I was there, I worked twenty hours a week and much more than that during the breaks, earning money to supplement my scholarship. I worked as a proofreader for the university's press, a secretary to the dean of agriculture, a cameraperson for the long-distance learning program, and a machinist polishing glass slides. I taught swimming lessons, fetched library books, and ushered rich people to their seats within Northrop Auditorium. But none of it compared with the time that I spent working in a hospital pharmacy.

A girl from my chemistry class recommended me for a job in the university hospital, where she worked. The money was good, she said, and they let you work two eight-hour shifts in a row, earning time and a half during the second shift. Her boss hired me upon introduction, and after a disconcerting lack of scrutiny toward my credentials, I found myself the proud possessor of two new sets of turquoise scrubs.

The next day I showed up after classes at two-thirty in the afternoon, ready to work the three-to-eleven shift. I would be working in the basement of the hospital, within the main pharmacy that housed, sorted, and generally kept track of every medication administered to every patient in the hospital. It was a huge facility all its own, with an information desk, a delivery dock, and several storage rooms, including cold lockers kept at a range of low temperatures. It was built around an open-floor laboratory that seemed the size of a warehouse, full of people mixing the made-to-order prescriptions needed for the more complex therapies that were happening all over the hospital. The deputy pharmacist-in-charge explained to me that I would start as a “runner,” hand-delivering intravenous pain medications to the nursing stations where they were needed.

In those days, a doctor had to request medication by writing a paper prescription, which was then personally escorted to the hospital pharmacy. Within the pharmacy laboratory, a tiny amount of pure painkiller was injected into a floppy bag of fluid and immediately swaddled in a thick cloak of paperwork that required both a signature and a time stamp every time the bag was transferred between hospital workers. After the formula and the amount of drug it contained were double-checked and signed off on by a professional pharmacist sporting a Pharm.D. degree (the pharmacist's equivalent to the doctor's M.D.), the bag was handed to a runner, who signed it and then walked the bag through the hospital and handed it directly to the nurse in charge of the patient, who signed it again and then presumably administered the treatment.

After drop-off, it was the runner's duty to check the station's outbox for any other M.D. orders and, upon finding any, to carry them back to the pharmacy. It thrilled me that my signature was required to advance what I saw as an urgent process, and this ushered in a rich fantasy life, within which I was routinely relieving suffering, saving souls, and generally preserving the dignity of life all around. Just like every girl who has ever once earned an A in a science course, I had been encouraged to go to medical school, and I began to consider it, hoping against hope for a whopping scholarship of some kind.

My job as a runner allowed me to roam every hallway of the hospital and learn the idiosyncrasies of how each nursing station worked, although the majority of my trips simply navigated the well-traveled route between the pharmacy and the hospice ward. I learned to work through long hours that were unbroken by social interaction, save a signature and a look. Although I was surrounded by other people, never-dimming light, and humming machines, I worked in isolation and was no more disturbed by all the activity than I was by my own breathing.

I also discovered that I could set my subconscious to work on a specific task while my conscious mind was occupied with performing workday rituals. During my interview for the job, I had looked longingly into the main lab, where so many technicians worked industriously, filling and injecting needles, scrutinizing vials, and unwrapping sterile tubes. I had asked the pharmacist what they were making. “Mostly antiarrhythmics, heart-attack stuff,” she explained.

The next morning I told my English professor that the topic of my term paper would be “The Use and Meaning of ‘Heart' Within
David Copperfield.
” The high that I was riding after my declaration began to wear off as I immersed myself in flipping the pages back and forth, cataloging what turned out to be hundreds of instances of “heart,” “hearty,” “heartfelt,” and other derivatives within the first ten chapters of the book alone. I decided to restrict my paper to a treatment of only the most significant instances. This approach backfired when I hit the following within chapter thirty-eight:
What I cannot describe is, how, in the innermost recesses of my own heart, I had a lurking jealousy even of Death.
I thought about it and thought about it, but I didn't get anywhere. Finally, two o'clock rolled around and I had to go into work.

That night in the hospital I walked in and out of the hospice ward ten or twenty times, and my eyes and hands moved through the necessary tasks. Well into the night and deeper in my brain, it came to me that as hospital workers, we were being paid to trail along behind Death as he escorted frail, wasted bodies over difficult miles, dragging their loved ones along with him. My job was to meet the traveling party at its designated way stations and faithfully provide fresh supplies for the journey. When the weary group disappeared over the horizon, we turned back, knowing that another agonized family would be arriving soon.

The doctors, nurses, and I didn't cry because the bewildered husbands and stricken daughters were crying enough for all of us. Helpless and impotent against the awesome power of Death, we nonetheless bowed our heads in the pharmacy, injected twenty milliliters of salvation into a bag of tears, blessed it again and again, and then carried it like a baby to the hospice and offered it up. The drug would flow into a passive vein, the family would draw close, and a cup of fluid might be temporarily removed from their ocean of pain. When my hospital shift ended I found that I could go home and write pages and pages, while in contrast, sitting in front of the computer for hours before work had yielded nothing. I memorized the difficult passages from the book, and then let my subconscious work out their meaning while I was at the hospital.

Every hospital worker was required to take three twenty-minute breaks during each eight-hour shift, but runners were also requested to coordinate and stagger them, so that if things got unexpectedly busy, we would be down only one person at any given time. This policy forced me to manage the timing and extent to which I could wander through my own thoughts, and I developed a fine control over my ability to reemerge. I could work with my brain in my hands for hours, move it into my head for twenty minutes, and then shunt it back into my fingers in the same way that I could slosh water back and forth in a half-full bucket.

I spent my breaks in the tiny courtyards that nestled among the hospital's buildings, luxuriating in the natural light and unrecycled air. One morning I was lying on the grass with my legs elevated, counting the cigarette butts on the ground while trying to drain some blood back into my upper body.
The early sun was striking edgewise on its gables and lattice-windows, touching them with gold; and some beams of its old peace seemed to touch my heart,
I recited from chapter fifty-two. I saw my supervisor peer around the courtyard wall and then motion for me to come inside. For a moment I was terrified that I had lost track of time, until my watch told me that my break still had five minutes left in it. When we got back to the pharmacy lab, both my supervisor and the Pharm.D. were looking at me seriously. “Why don't you leave out the front door when you run a controlled-sub bag?” one of them asked me.

“Because I go and use the back stairway.”

“But you can't get to the walkway that crosses over to the hospice tower from those stairs,” my supervisor argued.

“You can if you cut through the cafeteria loading dock.”

“So you never use the elevator?” The Pharm.D. looked puzzled.

“It's a shortcut, and you never have to wait,” I answered. “It really is quicker, I've timed it. And, I mean, there's somebody up there in pain, waiting for this stuff, right?” My supervisors looked at each other, rolled their eyes, and returned to their other tasks.

It was only partly true that I had developed this route in order to cut my delivery times. I was also compelled to keep moving in order to burn off the endless energy that I possessed at that age, which seized me in ferocious spurts, keeping me awake for days at a time. Hospital work gave me a place to be and a mission to accomplish, complete with repetitive tasks that helped to constrain my racing thoughts.

Near the end of the afternoon shift, it never failed that some runner would call in sick, giving me the option to work the night shift if it looked as if I wasn't going to sleep anyway. Sooner or later I would go home at least exhausted if not sleepy, comforted by the night's companionable wakefulness, and a full paycheck richer in the bargain;
the shells and pebbles on the beach…made a calm in my heart,
I remembered from chapter ten. Plus I was doing something important—or so I had convinced myself.

About a month after I had explained my delivery routes, I walked into the pharmacy and the Pharm.D. turned and called out, “Lydia, she's here!” She then turned to me and explained, “Lydia is going to train you to shoot bags,” and just like that, my career as a runner was over. Lydia stood up from her post and cast a sideways glance at the boss. The look on her face didn't exactly congratulate me on my promotion, but I sensed that Lydia's training was a necessary hurdle positioned between me and a big fat raise.

“Come on back and take a load off!” Lydia yelled in her gravelly voice, more to annoy the Pharm.D. than to welcome me. I got excited and
my heart leaped with a new hope of pleasure,
to quote chapter twenty. Instead of delivering the bags of intravenous medications, I was going to make them, and then hand them over to someone else for double-checking and delivery. I pictured myself sitting down at my own workstation and adjusting my stool to the perfect height. I pictured myself walking importantly back and forth from the stock table, picking out exactly the right little bottles of concentrated drugs in the same way that a rich woman confidently seizes upon the perfect shade of nail polish before her manicure. I saw myself take my position, sit up straight, square my shoulders, and begin to work my magic, calmly but quickly—because, after all, someone's life was at stake.

“Here, pull your hair back tight”—Lydia interrupted my daydream by dangling an industrial rubber band in front of my face—“and you better get used to yourself without makeup. I bet you think that I look like this hell all the time,” she mused with a grim smirk. Loose hair, nail polish, jewelry—none of these were allowed in the pharmacy, as they presented additional surface area that might harbor contamination, and so I adopted the frazzled “natural” look that you so often see in hospital staff, and I have kept it to this day.

The employee pool was about evenly split between preprofessional students and career technicians, but I didn't fit in with any of them. Like the students, I had classes and exams to worry about, but like the techs, I worked way too much, because I just needed somewhere to be. Lydia was what was called a “lifer” within the pharmacy laboratory, which meant she was already there when anyone queried had been hired. While I stowed my backpack, Lydia notified our supervising Pharm.D. that she was going to teach me the differences between the drugs in the stockroom, where they were shelved according to their chemical formulas. I was only mildly surprised when she walked right past the stockroom and toward the courtyard instead.

Lydia was famous for two things: her breaks and her rides. She would take all of her breaks during the first ninety minutes of each of her eight-hour shifts and attempt to smoke the three packs of cigarettes that she would have consumed across eight hours had they been leisure time. Smoking sixty cigarettes in sixty minutes requires no small amount of concentration, and even though it was easy to locate her in the courtyard, she was generally too occupied for conversation. During the second hour of her shift, Lydia was extremely alert and productive, but it was generally wisest to give her a wide berth about five hours later, when any perceived slight could really set her off. During the last twenty minutes of her shift, even the pharmacists avoided her as she sat stiffly watching the clock, clutching a sterile needle in her shaking fist.

It seemed out of character, but if you were female and worked a shift with Lydia that ended at night, she would insist on giving you a ride home. An incoherent string of snarls about “asshole rapists” was the only explanation that we ever got for her strategic generosity. It was hard for me to picture these rapists, dressed for the twenty-below weather and circling the hospital in a holding pattern until 11:00 p.m., when a fatigued herd of nursing-student prey would stagger into their hunting grounds, but in that part of the country we didn't have the kind of Januaries where you turned down a ride for any reason.

Once released from the gas chamber of secondhand smoke that also served as Lydia's car, you had to strip off your scrubs in the hallway in order to prevent your apartment from smelling like the coal miners' union hall for a week. Lydia never drove off until she saw you go inside and flash the porch light on and off. “Blink it more than once if somebody needs their balls ripped off,” she instructed us maternally.
She did not replace my mother; no one could do that; but she came into a vacancy in my heart, which closed upon her,
I remembered from chapter four, and smiled to myself.