If you squinted and sloshed the rectangular flask just a little, a light, slimy scuzz stuck to the bottom. The liquid was filmy, opaque and pinkish. My labmate was groaning softly, staring into the tiny universe held daintily between her gloved thumb and forefinger.
“I think they’re dead,” she said.
The line for the microscope was eight people long. I admit—the color of the liquid was looking a little off.
Our professor was a tyrant in a priest’s collar and a lab coat. As we stared at our little flask, I could hear him berating a girl for contaminating a bottle of starch solution, the whir of the fridge and the -40 freezers humming underneath the tense encounter. He stood about my height—a measly five feet—with the broad shoulders of a powerlifter and small, stabbing eyes. We’d been tasked with taking care of a batch of wiggly, ravenous Chinese hamster ovary cells for a whole semester. A task which entailed feeding them three times a week, trekking to the lab outside scheduled class time, using perfect sterile technique–the college biology version of carrying around a sack of flour for three months. If our CHO cells were dead we would instantly lose half our lab grade.
So we waited in line, sweating in our crumpled Tyvek lab coats, praying to God and the patron saint of angry priests (whoever that is) that somewhere in that pink primordial ooze we still had some living cells.
I’ve never been to an ultrasound—never seen the jelly, the wand, the teeny glimpses of a fetus on a screen—but I’ve felt the heady, nauseating mix of terror and optimism of a pregnant woman in a waiting room. I felt it there in line, waiting, forever.
One after the other, the four pairs of lab mates in front of us found out their cells were alive and well. They celebrated and hit the stock room for more feeding solution. We took our place at the microscope, reset the high contrast lens, slipped the flat-backed flask underneath, and waited for the liquid to settle a bit before zooming in.
We figured out almost immediately what the film was: bits of CHO cell tissue. Hence the slime—some cells had simply self-imploded from hunger.
“Did you feed them?” I asked my labmate, concerned.
“I forgot,” she shrugged.
“The whole week?” She shrugged again.
But we searched the far reaches of the flask, looking for signs of life. Taking care of CHO cells is a little like babying a sourdough starter you’ve neglected in the back of the fridge. If you have even a single cell that’s still alive and well, you can start again. It just takes a clearout of the fallen soldiers and a round of hearty, nutritious carbohydrate solution.
There. Just there, deep in the corner of the flask, a little mosaic of cells adhered to the bottom. Not dead, but starving. We were saved. I took the damned little cells from the microscope, washed the debris off the happy clump (gently, gently), fed them, and tucked them in the incubator.
I took over feeding the cells for the rest of the semester.
I don’t remember many of the details from molecular biology—the pathways and acronyms escape me now. But I do remember what it felt like to take on the inconvenience of hiking across campus and up the hill three times a week because I didn’t trust my lab mate to touch the CHO cells. I remember marching up to our professor-priest to ask for more feeding solution when no one else would. I remember when I came back into the wide auditorium for the first lecture after Christmas break, and he asked me, with far too much surprise in his voice, “You came back? I thought you’d stay in Oregon.”
Even now it bothers me. Could he see through me?
I lost most of that year in a fog of sadness. I was high-functioning depressed—I thought I hid it well. I went to class, wrote essays, studied obsessively, filled pages and pages and pages of printer paper with formulae and vocabulary and theorems. I went to softball practice, went to the library, did the things I had to do.
But every time I walked into my dorm room I laid flat on my face on the pink Walmart shag carpet and sobbed. I spent a lot of time alone, eating cafeteria food out of Styrofoam containers, staring at my cinderblock walls.
I was self-imploding, falling apart—but no one came to feed me.
Later, during my senior year, I was chatting with another professor in the biology department as we checked on the cichlid fish we used to study animal behavior. One of the pairs had mated, and the female fish was tending to her clutch of eggs. Cichlids are attentive parents. Female fish often corral their eggs after they lay them—even after the eggs hatch into “wrigglers,” the mom picks up the babies in her mouth and spits them back in the refuge of a canted clay flower pot on the gravel floor of the tank. If you watch for a while, you’ll see the male fish come along and hover in the mouth of the flowerpot, covering childcare duties as the female goes off to find something to eat. They’re equitable little chordates, cichlids.
As I reached for a fish net hanging on the wall my professor spotted the tattoo on my wrist. He asked when I got it. I laughed and told him it was my depression tattoo from sophomore year.
“Depressed? I didn’t know you were depressed,” he said, incredulous.
It was bad, I told him. He seemed shocked that he hadn’t noticed; I spent an awful lot of time in the lab chatting that year. The conversation moved on to other things—there was work to be done; there’s always work to be done.
I think about that conversation sometimes when I see my tattoo. I hid a lot from the people I respect, the people I care about. I didn’t want to tell my family that I spent a good chunk of each day crying in my room—they were in Oregon, I was in Pennsylvania. What the heck could they do but worry? My best friend at the time had a new boyfriend, I had a room to myself, and I got everything done with a big smile on my face. How could they know?
Things are better now. Like the CHO cells, there was some little clump of hope that stayed alive through my sophomore year, waiting for a cleanout and some fresh food to keep growing. And since I don’t go all pink and slimy when I’m self-imploding, I learned that it’s up to me to ask for help.
People—even the ones you love, the ones you care about most—can’t tell when you’re starving. Sometimes you just have to tell them, in your kindest voice, that you need a bath and some careful attention.
Let me tell you, the freshening up sure feels good.
Thank you so much to the Foster folks who contributed to this piece: Sasha Levage, Lyle McKeany, and Jillian Anthony.
shutter open 