Behind closed doors

I walked through the halls of Parkland Hospital this afternoon, near the same halls where they wheeled John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, quite a while before I was born. Some of the walls are probably the same color--lime green and faded yellow, with wooden-handled stair rails worn smooth like a bone-handle knife that you keep in your pocket for years and years. For a long time, this was the event that put Dallas on the map, and caused many parts of the country to hate Dallas. Still, when people come in from out of town, I usually drive them by the shooting site, pointing out the famous landmarks such as the Schoolbook depository, the "grassy knoll", and the triple underpass. People over a certain age are usually in awe and introspective. Under that age, they politely, maybe quizzically shrug and thank me for driving them around.

Going around a corner and continuing toward my destination, I went down a putrid-smelling hall reeking from plastic bags filled with rotting human tissue--red Biohazard bags piled eight feet high in a large bin, resting and simmering in the still-hot Texas heat just outside the door and a gentle wind just strong enough to waft it in an assault through the adjacent halls so you can smell when you are walking up on this area. Glancing at the bags on the way to my appointment, I remembered the line from Doctor Zhivago about "laying life on the table and cutting out the tumors of injustice", and then mentally flipped the figurative language to realism and wondered whose tumors lay inside the waste in front of me--whose skin, blood, pieces of organ, etc. were being tossed in the trash. I was thoroughly grossed out and I can still conjure up that awful odor. They say that the sense of smell is one of the most primal.

I flashed back to another scene that shocked me last week. I was in a research facility and I agreed to help fix a piece of equipment. It's a type of "top-secret" place where I have to give 24-hours notice to get in, have a constant escort while on the premises, sign in and out, wear a badge, and even put on a cleanroom suit. One of the researchers was leading me around and I turned a corner and stopped walking for a second. I was at the end of one of the longest hallways I've ever seen which was lined with cage after cage after cage, primed to be filled with experimental animals. There must have been thousands of cages. I can't find the right adjective--it was staggering.

Deep down inside, I know that experimental animals are helpful to all of us, and I typically feel pretty cavalier about that--my instinct is to instantly defend the use of animals in research. I've personally used and killed animals for research and for study. I reject and even mock PETA's agenda because I feel it is so ridiculous and radical that it can not be taken seriously--they really do themselves a disservice through their extremes. But this one time, looking at these thousands of cages, I was struck for the first time that perhaps something is wrong somewhere that makes this whole scene necessary. Do we really need 10,000 animals to die, or could we get our data from a more reasonable number?

Now, here's the real thing that struck me now that I think about it--I saw a 36 cubic foot upright cage with brightly colored plastic toys inside. The cage was cold, grey metal and the wire door in the front of the cage was left swinging open. I thought of the dog or cat or rabbit or even a monkey playing with those toys right before being quickly and coldly snatched up...

The toys are a distraction, aren't they?--a pitiful distraction to keep the animal from going crazy while it is readied for death. Made me think about life...

My mind flashes to the girl in the red dress in Schindler's List. I'm sure that somebody, somewhere has done a well-thought-out academic paper on this girl's role in the movie, but here's my interpretation: Throughout this movie, we see people murdered in mass numbers. It's there in front of us literally happening in black and white (interpretation: it's a cold fact). This girl in the red dress makes you realize that each of the victims is an individual--otherwise your mind goes numb in light of the huge numbers of dead. Later, when the girl ends up hurled into a mass grave, she isn't just a number--we are reminded that she was an individual: living, breathing, precious--she isn't merely a statistic. It's a loss of an individual and the loss becomes more real to us through this device. I jumped, but didn't cry, when the soldier abruptly executes a man with a bullet between the eyes.

That's what those plastic toys did to me--I involuntarily saw the blood-spattered corpse of the girl in red and it gave me pause.

Also yesterday I found myself walking behind a doctor and a herd of medical students. It reminded me of ER, one of my favorite shows--the doctor was quizzing the medical students and they were asking questions back and forth. Apparently, they were discussing transplanting tissue into a patient. The doctor, casting a suspicious sideways glance at me, a "foreigner", walking in step with the group quite by accident, starting speaking in special "doctor code"

"We will insert a porcine heart valve...blah blah blah" (that'll fool this leechy moron).

(besides being a silver medalist in the National Latin Exam, I a) knew what they were talking about anyway and b) didn't really care. But found their evasiveness amusing.)

One of the students hesitatingly asked, "Do they use a special...(quietly, almost whispering) pig?"

The doctor (smiling), "They do raise them specifically to be used for transplants, then they harvest the valve."

(then, chuckling) "They send the rest to the pepperoni factory...I guess I don't want to think if it that way, though..."

I didn't set out to make a political statement today. I was thinking about the ugly things that happen behind closed doors that we know are there but are glad that we don't have to deal with them. I've heard an odd saying "Two things you don't want to know how they are made: Laws and sausage." But more serious things occur behind closed doors--nursing homes crammed with aging people, harvesting animals by the thousands for research every day, cutting out both literal and figurative tumors to save the body--In a way, maybe these things make our lives easier and we're glad we don't have to dwell on them.