Back in December, I gave something called a Story Collider. It’s a performance (and podcast), where people tell stories about science and their lives. I told the story of a hero I once had. The recording is above and I’m including (with permission) a rough transcript of the story below. It never comes out quite like you write it.
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Lots of people are unpopular in high school. Some people are unpopular in middle school or even in elementary school. Heck, some people are unpopular in college. Not me.
I was unpopular in grad school.
I’m not sure precisely how it happened. But somehow, during my grad school interview, I managed to make a truly horrible impression. Between the time I interviewed for grad school and the time I arrived 6 months later, I was branded as an intolerable weirdo.
My first few months in grad school were hard. The classes I could handle. I found a few friends. But the other people in my program just did not like me and I couldn’t figure out why.
But then I got to know Carrie.
Carrie was a third year grad student in the lab I eventually ended up joining for my PhD. And Carrie was perfect. My kind of perfect. She was brilliantly smart, hilariously funny. She always knew more about the latest paper than I did. Her experiments never failed. She got straight As. She did amazing projects, with neurochemistry and behavior in mice, even though she was horribly allergic to them and had to go into the mouse colony gowned up to her eyebrows. She was the kind of grad student that every advisor trots out proudly, the kind who impressed the old senior white guys with her data and her amazing ability to quote Sora et al 1996 from memory.
Outside of work, she was the most popular girl in the program. Everyone knew who she was. Everyone knew she was brilliant. Everyone respected her opinion. She was a hard drinking, hard driving, kickball playing, Irish-step dancing powerhouse of a person. Bars she hung out at were the good bars. Parties she went to were the good parties.
Carrie didn’t dress for anybody. Most days, she wore jeans and a black t shirt. It’s possible there were other t shirts or hoodies. But I remember mostly jeans and a black t shirt, because she could not be bothered with what other people thought, she had science to do.
I worshipped her instantly. She became my hero, the ideal of what a perfect scientist should be like.
One night I stayed late in the lab, and she was there too. She always worked later hours than anyone else, which in grad school is an unspoken badge of honor. We got to talking, and she was friendly. To me! I asked her about her hobbies and she asked me about mine. She said I wasn’t so bad.
Later, she got me a beer, and toasted to my first late night in the lab. In that beer I tasted the glow of acceptance. It was the first beer I ever actually liked.
From then on I wasn’t popular, but I didn’t feel nearly so alone. It’s possibly that I was adjusting. But I always through it was Carrie.
I joined the lab. The years went by. Carrie graduated with the award for best dissertation. Of course she did, she was Carrie! She went off to a postdoc in an up and coming lab. Her postdoc advisor was thrilled with her work. She got engaged to a guy from our program. Everyone knew that Carrie was destined for great things. She got good publications. Her grants got funded. I saw her future, as a big advisor in a big lab, an amazing mentor, the kind of scientist that every grad student would want to be.
September 28, 2009. It was a Monday, a normal Monday in the lab. My advisor came in with this funny, blank look on her face. She told me that Carrie was dead.
It turned out that not only was Carrie hard living and hard drinking. She did hard drugs too. She was injecting a drug called buprenorphine. It’s usually used to help people who are addicted to drugs like morphine or heroin, or to treat severe or chronic pain. Most opiates activate receptors in areas that get you high and also activate receptors in areas of your brain that control breathing. When people die of opiate overdose, it’s often because the opiates suppressed their breathing.
Buprenorphine is a little different. It’s a partial agonist at opiate receptors. When you inject it, it does get you high, but since it’s a partial agonist you can’t overdose on it. Like a smart pharmacologist, buprenorphine was the drug Carrie chose. And like a smart pharmacologist, Carrie and her fiancée had Narcan, or naloxone, around to counteract the effects of the drugs. Just in case.
At first, we thought that, somehow, Carrie had overdosed. Maybe there was heroin in there and she didn’t know. But the autopsy showed she did not overdose. What happened was a little more strange.
She was injecting buprenorphine from a pharmacy in the Philippines. You never really know what’s in those, and in this case, maybe there was some mouse poop. Or fur. It doesn’t matter. The drug went in. Carrie’s hideous allergy to mice came out. She stopped breathing. But it wasn’t from the opiates. It was from anaphylactic shock. She was dead before the paramedics arrived.
It’s times like these I turn to stories that I make up about myself. I tell myself how things will go when something bad happens. How I’ll save my friends from bad dates or rescue a kid from a speeding moped. I tell myself that I’ll be brave. And when I am faced with death, I will be noble. I always told myself I would not cry when I found out someone died. I would hold my head high and I would have a noble look of pale suffering, but that I’d hold it together.
I’m never the person I want to be. I was a mass of tears in seconds.
I don’t remember much after that. I remember the whole lab avoided the phone. It rang incessantly with journalists trying to get the scoop. I remember crying in my labmate’s arms. Later that afternoon, I remember another grad student gently removing a mouse from my hands as I collapsed in tears for the fifth or sixth time. I had tried to continue working. I thought that was what Carrie would have wanted. Eventually they sent me home. Away from the lab where Carrie had worked, I could no longer cry.
I lost my hero that day. But it was more than that. Because that day and in the days after I realized: I did not know Carrie at all.
I don’t judge her for doing drugs. I studied drugs. I know there are many reasons to do them and many reasons to stay away.
But I realized that I did not know her. I didn’t know what made her happy. I didn’t know her ambitions. I made her into another person in my head. The person I wanted her to be.
A hero is someone you know from a distance. You make up stories in your head about who they are. They give you something to aspire to, behaviors you try on for yourself until you find what works.
My stories about Carrie were not about her. They were about me. They were about who I wanted to be. The hard driven scientist who was still fun and full of life.
Sometimes I still catch glimpses of Carrie. I still believe, somewhere deep down inside, that I’ll turn a corner at a big meeting and there she’ll be, laughing loudly with a group of people in her black t shirt. I know she’d give a great talk. I know she’d be perfect. Because she’s Carrie.
But then I remember that Carrie is gone. And that hard-driven, perfect scientist? She never existed in the first place.
