Lab Girl by Hope Jahren Read Free Book Online Page B

my eyes, Lydia was ancient, which meant that she was probably about thirty-five years old. At least thirty-four of those years had been hard years, I figured, given the way that she carried herself. I supposed that Lydia had also been unlucky in love, since she perfectly fit the type who would be sitting at a kitchen table nursing a coffee cup full of gin while waiting for the kids to come home from school, had she been blessed within a matrimonial union. Chapter thirty-six said it better than I could:
She gave me the idea of some fierce thing, that was dragging the length of its chain to and fro upon a beaten track, and wearing its heart out.
    To my surprise, Lydia was also curious about me and asked me where I was from. After learning the name of my hometown she responded, “Yeah, I’ve heard of it; that’s where that big hogkill is at. Cripes, you crawled right out of the armpit of the Midwest, didn’t you?” I shrugged, and she continued, “Well, there’s only one place worse than that, and it’s the frozen shithole up north where I grew up.” She threw a smoldering butt on the ground, looked at her watch, and then lit another cigarette.
    We passed the next five minutes in silence. Finally, she exhaled and said, “You ready to go back?” I shrugged by way of answer, and we both stood up. “You just do what I do, okay? I’ll go slow, it’ll be fine,” she said, and thus concluded my formal training in pharmaceutical medicine. I still didn’t have a crystal-clear idea of how I was to assemble a sterile mixture of medications that could be injected into a desperately sick person’s vein, but I guessed that I would pick it up as I went along.
    Sitting next to Lydia and carefully mimicking her actions didn’t turn out to be a bad way to learn sterile technique, which is more like dancing with your hands than it is like making something. The air through which we walk, both outdoors and inside our buildings, contains plenty of tiny organisms that would feed quite happily on our insides but don’t usually bother us because they can’t get close enough to our juicy parts, such as our brains and hearts. Our outer skin is thick and whole, and any openings, such as those for our eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, are coated in protective slime and wax.
    This also means that every needle in every hospital might be the winning lottery ticket for a lucky random bacterium who, after recovering from the initial rush of injection, finds himself swishing along within a jolly river of blood until he disembarks in some quiet cul-de-sac of the kidneys, perhaps. There he will breed and also produce one bumper crop after another of toxins that are all the harder for us to fight because they were produced near our organs. The bacteria represent only one hostile faction, with viruses and yeasts capable of their own similar modes of destruction. A sterile needle represents our best defense against such an onslaught.
    When a nurse gives you a shot, or draws your blood, it’s a relatively quick puncture, in and out, and afterward your skin closes over and reestablishes multiple firewalls against reentry. Your caregiver ensures against bacterial stowaways by using a syringe with a pointed tip that’s been sterilized and then sealed into a protective plastic cap. She rubs your skin with rubbing alcohol (isopropanol) in order to cleanse your outermost layer of any bacteria that might otherwise get shoved into your body during the injection.
    When you are given an intravenous medication, it’s a little different. The nurse cleans your skin, inserts a needle, and then leaves it there for hours, effectively making the needle, the tube, and the entire bag that is attached to it an extension of your vein—and all the liquid in the bag becomes an extension of your bloodstream. She will hang the bag over your head in order to encourage fluid to flow from the bag into you and not vice versa, and she’ll activate a pump to very gently force it