Rabbits

I was flawed as a research lab technician from the beginning. I cared about
the animals. You simply can’t. You have to care more about people more than animals. If you do care, what happened to me will happen to you.

Using ether-soaked cotton balls, inside a syringe case and a tiny pipette that was inserted just behind the mouse’s eyeball until it bled into the pipette, I took blood samples from mice that were used in experiments. The eyeball went back into
place and the bleeding stopped. The mouse wasn’t blinded by the
procedure and woke up unharmed. It took a good vision, steady hands and a lot of
fine muscle coordination. We did medical research on animals.

That’s what I had. That was why I got to do this work instead of being
a secretary or a waitress in a bar crunching around in Go Go boots on peanut shells
all night while my boyfriend took
care of my son.

Always another perfect day in paradise offered up by San Diego,
California in 1972. The sun came up and burned off the fog over the
ocean and the day warmed up then cooled off at night when
the fog rolled in again over Ocean Beach.
I worked at the UC San Diego and Scripps Institute. Most
women my age with no education beyond high school were working as
waitresses or secretaries. I worked in medical research.
This meant that we did research on dogs, rats, mice, frogs, monkeys and pigs. The lab techs made
a game of naming the pigs after the other lab techs. I would hear the dogs howling when I got in my car to go home at
night. I lost count of the times I wanted to rescue one of the dogs. Just
take one of them home without saying anything. But with a 5-year old
son to raise and living in rentals there was only room for the cats we
adopted. A dog would have limited my choices, I couldn’t afford that.

Gene, a tech, I worked with told a story about the monkey at the lab when he was there late one night and walked through the room where the monkey cage was. He looked at the monkey and it gestured with it’s index finger while looking at him intensely, to him a distinct human gesture that said “come here” He said he couldn’t get out of the room fast enough.

The anti-vivisectionists came to demonstrate one time while I was there. They closed the lab for a day and postponed procedures. The research doctors believed that the cost was worth the good they did for human
disease cures.  I am sure that they are right.

Our lab did research on lymphocytic correo meningitis. The doctor I worked for was professional, intelligent and
treated me as a professional. One Monday morning he told me about
another doctor who had committed suicide by shutting himself in a
freezer. He sat down across from me when he told me and leaned into me slightly. I didn’t know the doctor who had died. He was clearly shocked.

He said it was probably not a painless way to die since your
body temperature goes down one degree per hour. He was clearly in
shock from the news. It was the first time I knew that their lives were
filled with pressure. I worked with another lab tech from Denmark who
brought Schnapps to work in her thermos every day. She made no attempt to hide it and even offered me some. I said no thanks. She was married to a research doctor. He was a
temperamental man, quick to anger and always working hard working. I
can’t imagine that it ended well. There was a party at the beach one
night when someone put a beach towel wet with sea water over his
bicycle and he flung it off, very angry that his bicycle might be
ruined. Everything was important. I understood exactly how he felt.
Things didn’t come easily for me either. I had a conversation with the doctor whom I worked for about national healthcare. We worked with people from countries where they had other healthcare systems and I was curious about his point of view. He said, “If we have free healthcare people will go to the doctor for no reason, if they have a hangnail.” That was the prevailing opinion.

My son, Sean was with me when I went to the lab one Saturday. He saw all of the lab equipment through the door. He said, “Mom, you’re a scientist.” “I guess I am,” I said. I never showed him the animals.

I didn’t see it that way until that moment. It’s always good to have another pair of eyes. Until then it was just a job.

 I rode a bicycle on nice days instead of driving my VW. The kind that
was so old that it didn’t have a gas gauge. I could calculate it using mileage. I had a 10 gallon tank and the car got 25mpg. I had one gallon reserve tank. When the engine sputtered I flipped the reserve tank and
found the nearest gas station and bought gas for .25 a gallon. $2.50
to fill the tank again. The car lasted until I graduated from college.
It amuses me to think about it now. I was a cliché in the VW bug, with my long blonde hair, in San Diego I drew unwanted attention.

One hot fall day on the way home I stopped at a stop light and a
middle-aged Mexican man started talking to me, not exactly talking.
You know what I mean. I could hear him making noises, kissing noises. I ignored
him. But I was not in a good mood and I was just too tired to put up
with it in my usual way. The weather in San Diego was hot in September. It is the month when the Santa Ana winds blow. Winds so hot and dry that they curl a piece of paper left out. This was the month
when tourists should plan their trips from the east instead of
June when they always come when it was cold and windy.
I was never confrontational. I never wanted
to provoke anyone and I never got into any fights. This time was
different. Something just snapped. I listened for a while because the
red light that kept us sitting next to each other on the street was a
long one and then I turned and looked at him.
“Just exactly what kind of a noise IS that?” I said. I glared at him
and didn’t look away. I didn’t smile and didn’t roll up my window. I
didn’t make any attempt to back down. He kept it up for a while and
then he got a little scared. He knew I was just a little crazy at that
moment. Hot late afternoon sun in my eyes, he wasn’t sure what he had
gotten into. He probably considered running the red light just to get
away from me. I continued to glare at him. I asked him again. “Well?”
He ignored me. Then he turned and looked straight at me and said, “I sing too.”
Then the light changed. Men like him never approached me again.

He must have mistaken me for someone else. Like a green diamond that everyone thinks is a Peridot. It’s a diamond, rare and intense.

I could see that it was difficult for everyone who
did that work. The suicide, the girl with her thermos filled with
Schnapps it all made me ask what was constellating.
The previous semester I had started taking classes at San Diego State
with the idea of going part time and finishing my art degree while
working full time as a lab tech.
I thought this would be a good way to finish school. Practical,
responsible and financially within reach it seemed like the only way.
My boyfriend had decided to move on while he finished law school.

Another tech decided to show me how to ‘sacrifice’ the rabbits we
worked with. The white rabbits were used to produce antibodies for
research on lymphocytic coreo meningitis. That’s all they did. Their blood was
used in experiments. I took blood samples from their long pink ears
with a syringe in the long vein. Sometimes the rabbits ears became too
difficult to get samples from and the rabbits were no longer useful.
The tech took a rabbit out of its cage and stuck a syringe filled with
air into its heart. “That’s how we sacrifice a rabbit,” she said.
It was too awful to even react visibly. I could only watch her face and wonder who she was inside.

I took a step back from her when she finished showing me how to “sacrifice” a rabbit. I didn’t want to show my reaction, but I guess I already had. I didn’t say anything. I needed more time. More time to put a plan in place.

I really liked those big white rabbits.
I knew that I was never ever going to stick a
syringe into a rabbit’s heart and kill it. Within two weeks I
had given notice, signed up for classes full time, applied for financial
aid and moved into the spare room of a friend’s home with my son to
wait for the financial aid money to come through. My boss told
everyone at Scripps, “I just can’t believe she just quit without
knowing what she was going to do afterwards.”

Welfare was discontinued for women who went to school in the 70s. I didn’t renew my application and when it was due the next month after I returned to school. I didn’t call them. I just disappeared. A social worker called me and started scolding me. It was as if I were an unruly child for not continuing to apply for welfare. I was amazed that they were so aggressive about tracking down welfare recipients. You know, all of those worthless mothers who are too lazy to work. Except that I did work and welfare, at that time, was really a subsidy for a company that paid low wages. It wasn’t intended to do anything for me at all. If I wanted to go back to school I was on my own.

I listened to his rant. I said I wasn’t receiving payments, hadn’t expected them and didn’t know why he was calling. He started apologizing.

It was a time of suspicion of welfare mothers. A neighbor of mine was raided at 6am by social workers to determine of the father of her child was contributing to her child’s care. I’m not sure exactly why the 6am raid was an indicator, but they discovered that there was a chicken that the father had donated for the mother and child to eat and this was an example of welfare fraud. It was Ronald Reagan’s California at that time.

I admire Reagan’s leadership now, but this was how his policies affected the people on the first rung of the economic ladder when he was governor of California. The Strand showed one of his old cowboy movies, around that time, that had a bar fight scene in it. The movie theater audience cheered when Reagan’s character got punched and went reeling backwards over tables and chairs.

It was August when I left the job and went back to school. I went to classes for
three months without knowing what would happen. Three months of going to classes essentially in financial free-fall without knowing there was money on the way.

One day at a time.

 It was Veterans Day
when the letter came saying my financial aid and work-study job had
been approved. I had $75 left. It was a good day.