Mother of Irony

1        Mother of Irony

I got a call from a journalist at 10 a.m. I answered and asked him to call me back at noon, during my lunch break, when I usually have more time. He didn't specify the reason for his call, but I assumed it was somehow related to the case that's been on the news. I saw some reports on TV while I was cooking breakfast this morning. I usually turn on the TV after brushing my teeth. The news was playing on the background while I cracked some eggs to make an omelet. Two eggs with some spinach leaves, some feta cheese, and a pinch of salt.

The news outlets were covering a big international case, and several human rights organizations were involved, I think. And it was somehow related to our line of work, though I don’t know yet how. I turned off the TV to rush for work this morning, so I didn't catch the whole explanation of the case. I just buttoned my shirt, and slipped on some sneakers, and drove to work. And I also did not turn on the radio news on my way to work because I usually just listen to classical music when there's traffic. And there was a lot of traffic this morning, so I put one of my usual CDs in the stereo. Mozart and Beethoven played in the background as I drove by the scene of a Sedan slammed against a truck.

We bred mice in cages. Rows and rows of cages full of mice were stored in rooms of more than 250 square meters in area. The building I work at has three of these rooms, and they are located deep in the basement, where the pungent smell of mouse urine perturbs nobody. They are all cages of the same size and shape. They are all transparent. They all have an upper compartment for mouse food, and they all have an opening for a water bottle. Every day, I take the elevator, and ride all the way down to the basement, then walk 100 feet, and take two lefts until I arrive at the room where I store my mice.

As a lab technician, I am required to check for pregnant female mice every day. The procedure involves introducing eyebrow tweezers in the tiny rodent’s vagina and opening and closing the tweezers several times. The mice usually scream during the procedure because I guess it hurts, but I am still required to check for the presence of a white mesh. If the vagina looks black, like the deep, cavernous tunnel it is, I can conclude that the female mouse hasn’t had intercourse in a while. If on the other hand, a thin, white mesh covers the entrance of the vagina, I can assume that a male mouse had gotten lucky a few minutes earlier. The procedure is standardized and approved by mouse breeding protocols. I learned the methods from my boss, a post-doctoral researcher who also happens to be a physician.

My boss has been checking mouse vaginas twice a day every day for two years. During those more than 700 days, and more than 10,000 mouse vaginal checks, his wife got pregnant and now they are expecting a baby. Conceiving was hard for his wife because she has fertility issues. They had to have intercourse many times before getting the wife impregnated, or so I suppose. I knew all this because my boss used to talk a lot about parenthood and careful family planning while opening and closing mouse vaginas. So, naturally, the first day that he showed me the procedure to check female mice with tweezers, I couldn’t help but wonder if he had done that same procedure to confirm that his wife had been impregnated correctly.

I imagined it vividly.

First, he would have intercourse with his wife. Bed rocking back and forth. Then, he would go and grab sterile thongs, or maybe use his fingers, soak them in lube, and expand her vagina wide, wide open. ‘Am I impregnated yet, dear?’, his wife would ask sweetly, turning her head to a side to lock eyes with her husband. ‘No, you’re not impregnated yet, my love. I guess we should keep trying’, he would reply sweetly, grinning, as always. Like a romcom. And they would have sex every day. And he would repeat that routine every day, just as he did with mice.

I always wonder that every time I come to the mouse room. Did he check his wife’s vagina right after intercourse during those two years that they tried to have babies? I will always wonder, I guess.

I was wondering those things when I received the call from the journalist.

He called 1 hour earlier than I was expecting, so I was still in the mouse room, surrounded by cages and the smell of mouse urine. I answered the call. After introducing himself, the journalist asked me how I had met my boss, and when had he left town. That question was unexpected. And that question made me rewind my memory tape some to some months earlier when I was new in the lab.

“Are you sure you can take care of all the mice while I’m gone?”, asked the pale, tall guy standing in front of me. He arched his eyebrows as he asked the question, sending ripples from the base of his forehead all the way back to his receding hairline, a naked jungle with little trees.

I nodded and replied, “Yeah, I can. I’ve followed the protocols under your supervision many times”

“I’m just asking. It’s a lot of responsibility,"”, he said. He was now standing in front of a mouse cage, balancing a shrieking and tiny baby mouse on his hand. The pink and hairless creature was slowly creeping on his hand, searching desperately for its mom.

“I know it’s a lot of responsibility, but I can handle it. Plus, I have all the protocols printed and pasted on the walls,"”, I said, pointing towards the immaculately clean, white lab walls.

He smiled a resigned smile and turned around to continue checking the newborn mouse pups. He was a man in his late forties with a perpetual tired and bored look on his face. He had hired me because he was planning to take a short vacation to El Salvador with his wife, and he needed a lab technician. He was going to attend a friend's wedding, while I was going to take care of his mice and cell lines. He worked with human and mouse embryos.

Yes, I work with stem cells.

The living matter that could have gone to become full-fledged organisms. Just like you and me when we started our life journeys. When our dads’ sperms swam fast and rammed their heads against our mothers’ eggs and fused into a cell to create an explosion of enormous possibilities. With the small difference that you were allowed to grow and become a person, while the mouse embryos I work with are perpetually enslaved to give up their cells and lives to science. Small difference. The cells I work with could have become baby mice. Mice that could have reproduced and have more baby mice. But also, mice that could have grown secluded in a cage surrounded by thousands of mice in cages in a mouse facility at a research institution, one hundred miles deep into science hell. The latter makes me feel better about using the cells. These mice would have lived a miserable life anyway. They were born in the wrong place and at the wrong time. Forever condemned to give up their lives for the betterment of humanity - a good justification for ending a life. Or so we tell ourselves.

Does it trouble me? Well, sometimes. I sometimes catch myself meditating about the meaning of life whenever I pipette embryos up and down inside a flask. Shaking the futures of other mammals up and down as if they were snowflakes inside a snow globe. Ending lives up and down when I change the cell medium. Ending lives in the hopes of saving lives. Human lives. Other species lives are not deemed worthy.

The journalist on the other side of the line cleared his throat, exasperated. I had probably been lost in my thoughts for several minutes, as usual.

“Yes?”, I asked, shaking my head.

“You were telling me about how you met Dr. Patel”

“Oh yes, right. I met Dr. Patel about a year ago when he hired me to work as his lab technician. I check on his mice and on his stem cells°

“Stem cells, huh? That's ironic”

I remained silent, not understanding the turns this conversation was taking.

“I´m sorry, Sir, but I think that I don't follow”

“Dr. Patel is being sentenced to 30 years in prison. Haven't you seen the news?”, the journalist explained using an incredulous tone, “His case is everywhere. And on his defense, he argued that he just killed a mass of cells. It makes sense now that you tell me that he´s a stem cell researcher. You, scientists, don't respect life at all”

I remained silent for some minutes, processing the news. The tone he was using offended me as a scientist, but I needed to know more about what had happened to Dr. Patel.

“I´m sorry, Sir, but what News Agency did you say you are calling me from?”

“Even if I told you the name of my company you wouldn't know. You´re American, and I work for a small news agency in El Salvador. Dr. Patel is being held in prison here”

“I see,"”, was all I could mutter in response.

The journalist asked me some more questions about our line of work, and about Dr. Patel´s personality. He wanted to write a well-rounded story, though I could imagine how biased it would be, especially after hearing him address me with a judgmental tone. After the phone interview ended, I took the elevator to the building´s cafeteria, bought a cup of coffee and all the newspapers they had. Then I sat in a small table far away from everyone. I needed alone time. I also used my phone to look up news articles covering Dr. Patel´s case.

Dr. Patel was being convicted for providing medical care to his wife. The pictures showed him handcuffed and with an affected face. Some showed him crying.

After arriving in San Salvador, Dr. Patel and his wife decided to walk around the colorful streets of the small Central American city. The sun was blazing, and heat rose from the asphalt streets. Other tourists swarmed around tour guides that warned them not to roam through the dangerous areas of town. They were strolling around Plaza Mansferrer when his wife flinched and complained of being in pain. At first, they both thought she was having a heat stroke, or maybe a headache. She hadn't been able to sleep the night before. She had been anxious about their safety in El Salvador. She had had a nightmare in which a faceless man had killed her husband. She had been scared from the beginning about traveling to a city that's always on the news for their crimes. So, they both thought she was just having a headache. But some minutes later, they both noticed in horror that blood was running between her legs. She fainted. Dr. Patel screamed and alerted the tour guide, who called an ambulance. Dr. Patel tried to give his wife first aid on the ride to the hospital, but she didn’t respond. Blood was everywhere. Red tides covered her skin and soaked her clothes.

When they arrived at the hospital, local doctors ran tests on his wife. They took blood tests, they did X-rays, and some doctors asked Dr. Patel how many months of pregnancy his wife had. Two months, he answered. He explained how hard it had been for her to conceive, and that they were both aware that his wife was prone to having complications due to her age. Dr. Patel asked if the doctors were suspecting of any miscarriage. The doctors replied that she was having an ectopic pregnancy and that the embryo had traveled all the way through her Fallopian tubes and attached to her intestines. Rare case, but it happens. Dr. Patel knew all of this, and he also knew that, as most ectopic pregnancies, she was at risk of dying if she wasn't treated immediately. He requested her pregnancy to be terminated to save her life. The Salvadorian doctors refused, and Dr. Patel protested.

“I´m sorry, Sir, but that's the law. If we choose to save her, and she survives, she could face 15 to 30 years in prison for aggravated homicide,"”, a local doctor had said.

“But if you don't terminate her pregnancy, she´ll die! This is my wife we´re talking about!”

“Yes, but at least she won´t go to jail and I won´t taint my hands with sin”

The way they said that last line rang in Dr. Patel´s ears. How could they use religion to justify not practicing a medical procedure? A medical procedure that was the only way they could save his wife? His wife, his partner of many years, the only person that cared about him after his whole family had died in a car accident some years earlier. His wife with whom he had tried for years to build a family, and when they had finally succeeded, it was going to cost him her life?

“To hell with your sins and your laws! You only care about your medical license. I and my wife are Americans. And we´re not Catholic! You need to do something!”. His voice reeked of desperation.

“Yes, you´re American, but you´re in El Salvador, and this is the law. I´m really sorry about your wife, but I can't help you”

“But this is stupid! Why the hell did you take the Hippocratic Oath, then? This is barbaric! How do women in this country have children?”

One of the local doctors, which until then had remained silent, lashed out with fury.

“Many choose to die rather than to go to jail for many years. Others leave the country when they find out they're pregnant and immigrate to a foreign land to try to give birth. But what country wants Salvadorians elsewhere? For you, we´re all maras, we´re all killers, we´re all gang members! There are some stupid feminists that have been trying to pass a bill to change the law but let's pray to God that that doesn't happen. Fucking sinners. I don't want to see my country not following the law of God. And I don't know why these things keep happening. The Pope already allowed women in this country to use condoms and contraception thanks to Zika. All those whores out there should thank Zika!”

The local doctor stopped talking for some minutes. His face was red with fury.

Then he added, “I´m really sorry about your wife, sir, but I can´t help. I truly am sorry, but I'm just doing my job and my hands are tied”. He tucked his hands inside his white coat, and then he left the room.

Dr. Patel was left with a puzzling decision. He could either save his wife, and spend the next 30 years in jail, or he could let his wife die, and face the coldness of life alone.

Dr. Patel contacted the local U.S. Embassy and asked them to interfere. They told him that the legal process could take several days. His frustration was growing. He had learned in medical schools the basics of obstetrics, but he needed materials. He needed a bed, he needed instruments, he needed light, and he needed help.

Thank God for corruption in Latin America. He was able to bribe a group of nurses. $25 each. Pretty cheap considering that his wife´s life was on the line. They sneaked him into an empty room, and everything he needed was there.

The pictures of the news articles showed Dr. Patel hugging his wife. Her face was lifeless. Her youthfulness and her smile were gone. This was not the woman I remembered from visiting their house in the summers, and from sitting at their dinner table on Thanksgiving Day. One thing that news outlets in Latin America lack is respect for the family of the death. The pictures of her corpse were everywhere. Her skin was pale and her lips were blue. Dr. Patel was handcuffed and had his gaze lowered, surrounded by journalists and by the flash of hundreds of cameras. He had asked for international intervention. He had also asked for the laws to be changed. The Salvadorian Minister of Health was explaining the situation, and how, for many years, doctors had asked authorities to change the law. Ministers and Cardinals spoke about how the law reforms would conflict with the faith of most of the population. Several news articles talked about how this affected International Law.

I kept turning the pages of the stack of newspapers in front of me. After a while, I stopped and pushed the newspapers away. I also closed all the tabs I had opened on my phone. I felt nauseated, and I felt aimless. A deep hole had taken the place of my heart. I took my cup of coffee and took some sips. The liquid was stale, the coffee was cold, and the room had grown paler.

In El Salvador, having an unplanned miscarriage counts as an aggravated homicide and is penalized with 10 to 30 years in jail. Five other countries in Latin America and 20 more around the world still punish with jail the act of miscarrying a baby, even if it endangers a woman's life.