The Ether & The Damage Done
It’s not clear to me if I was invited or told to go to my first sacrifice. I was 8, maybe 9, and it didn’t feel like a choice. It’s 40 years later and I can still smell the ether on dad’s breath. The fumes surrounded him like cologne when he came home from a session. He’d pour a stiff scotch over ice, sit down in his large red chair, listen to classical music, and look more distant than usual. He was a scientist and deeply intellectual. He was also a large man prone to anger and bullying.
Radiobiology and Biophysics, cancer research, dual-modality treatment regimens, it all sounded so clinical, so esoteric. Distilled down it meant giving rats cancer then subjecting them to near toxic levels of radiation and chemo. Dad would balance the animal’s ability to tolerate the strain of tumor masses against the curative powers of chemistry and invisible, energetic particles. For the greater good mind you, torturing animals for science.
It was cold that night and the stars were sharp and shiny. We drove to the lab in dad’s white VW bug, the air-cooled engine rattling and buzzing down the dark streets. We didn’t say much. I could see my breath and my hands were cold. The red heater knob on the stalk between the seats didn't help, it may not have been connected to anything.
We drove past the hospital, behind some large industrial buildings, then in front of the incinerator tower with its small mountain of coal. Orange sparks rose and wavy heat poured into the sky. Not far from the incinerator was a short, arched tunnel that led to a deep quadrangle. Getting out of the car we were surrounded by eight stories of red brick and glass facing inward, framing the dark.
The hospital had been built, added to, then added to again, so many times that it was more maze than anything else. Square hallways with cinderblock walls painted institutional green. Shiny, over waxed floors. Walking them in the harsh fluorescent light was like levitating, your feet never touching actual tile. All of it perfectly tuned to echo faintly with the sound of your footsteps. Late at night the only people in the halls were the cleaning staff rhythmically buffing with those humming, silver machines.
Opening the door to the vivarium we were met with the warm smell of animal urine, cedar, food pellets, and antiseptics. When the lights snapped on the animals scurried around, at least the healthy ones did. I remember big, albino rabbits with large pink eyes. The pinkness made them hard to read, you couldn’t see the dilation of their pupils clearly. Dad’s rats were white too but not albinos. It was easy to read them. They were scared.
Consulting a clipboard on the wall dad walked up to the racks of wheeled, white cages and peered in. Some of the rats had died and he removed them to be dissected later, the extent of their cancer’s spread dutifully recorded. Over the years the numbers that died before “sacrificing” had dropped, a testimony to dad’s treatment regimen.
Dad put on a white lab coat and pulled a number of cages free from the racks, setting them on a rolling cart. The scurrying seemed more frantic as we wheeled them out and down the echoing hallway.
His area had a spartan office space lined with books, journals and magazines. A plaster bust of Apollo watched over it all from high on a pine shelf. There was a chemistry room where drugs were blended, an x-ray unit with it’s own lead-lined enclosure, incubators where the cancer cells grew, microscopes, microtomes, UV clean rooms that glowed harsh purple, and a scintillation counter with lots of flashing lights and buttons.
The sacrifice room was off by itself, a small space with a sloped, concrete floor that lead to a silver floor drain. It had metal walls and was sparsely furnished with several bare bulbs hanging free for light. Stainless steel tables lined the walls with cans of ether, small brown bottles, and surgical equipment.
Set to the side on a small table was a guillotine-like device with a long metal handle. Raising the handle pulled one of two metal plates up to reveal a triangular hole where you placed the rat’s head. A swift downward push brought the sharp top plate down and through the animal’s neck. The plate rasped down till blade and flesh connected with a blunt crackling sound. The rat was anesthetized with an overdose of ether but still I flinched. Not just the first time.
Sometimes, I’m not sure why, dad didn’t use the guillotine for a sacrifice. Instead he pulled the rat from its cage, rotated it to inspect the tumor mass on its side, then placed its head in a brown jar lined with ether soaked cotton. The animal would wriggle wildly at first but stilled as the fumes did their work. When it was inert and barely breathing dad would lay it on its back and open a slit in its lower belly with a scalpel. He’d then take surgical scissors and cut the animal open up to it’s neck. The rib cage was always tough, breaking the sternum took some effort. Then came the lateral cuts between the front legs and across the abdomen so that he could pull the ribs apart.
With the ribs pried apart you could see all of the rat’s internal organs. The mass of intestines, the large brown liver directly below the lungs, the still-pulsing heart. Using the scissors again dad made two quick diagonal cuts through the heart. At this point the rat usually stopped moving. Using a scalpel, he carefully removed the cancerous mass from the rat’s side and placed it in a specimen tray to be embedded in paraffin. The rat’s lifeless body was thrown into a special trash bag for biological waste. I’d watch dad do this, sometimes dozens of times in an evening, as the trash bags filled and the specimen trays lined up with grey masses of tumor.
To this day I’m puzzled by these outings. I’m not sure if there was an agenda or if it was simply an opportunity to spend time together. I remember the ether though and the frantic spasms of the dying rats. Mostly I remember dad’s indifference.
