What I forgot to tell you: the weekend after the doctor at urgent care thought maybe I had an ovarian cyst and not appendicitis, a memory.
In grad school, there were some experiments you did in your lab, to study the specific thing you were all studying, that required radioactivity. If the radioactive molecule turned into another radioactive molecule, it meant the protein you were studying was active in whatever sample you were testing. You tested malaria parasites, others tested rat sperm, others cells grown carefully in pink liquid in an incubator.
To do the experiment, you had to wear a lot of protection—lab coat, long pants, closed shoes, safety goggles, layers of gloves. You wore a little badge on your lab coat that would be collected every month and analyzed to make sure you weren’t being exposed to too many beta particles.
There was a certain smell to it all, these special reagents combined to make a sweet acrid odor that you would know anywhere but now find hard to describe. The smell would linger in your nose all day.
Beta particles, you remember learning in high school chemistry, and then again in the awful training that was required of anyone handling radioactivity in the lab, have a short half-life, which is why you could dump the waste into a large carboy and leave it for a few weeks until it was safe. They don’t penetrate plexiglass, so you had to reach your short arms around the shields to maneuver the reagents. Like following a recipe covered in protective gear and behind a shield. The particles cause DNA damage if they enter live cells, hence the double-gloving and long coat and the plexiglass.
You hated having to do these experiments. You would start sweating from the stress of not spilling and contaminating anything added to the layers of gear. Your goggles would fog up, your vision would blur.
One day, you were wearing a turtleneck sweater from Express knit in orange and pink synthetic yarn. It was the mid-2000s, so your jeans were around your hips, leaving just a slight gap between the hem of the sweater and the waist of the jeans. The container of liquid you were moving from one place to another was heavy, with a plexiglass shield balanced on top. Some of the liquid sloshed out, and found its way exactly between the buttons of your lab coat onto the centimeter of skin exposed underneath it.
You can’t remember if it was on your right or left side, but it seems like it must have been your right because that’s where you pointed when you showed the doctor where it hurts.
Your lab-mates saw your accident and scurried over to help as you were trying to get the container where it needed to go, safely into the hooded cabinet. They wiped at your abdomen with greasy de-contamination fluid while you joked about now having only one functional ovary. You think you remember that it was James who was rubbing at your abdomen but then wonder if you think that because you recently got word that he died of metastatic prostate cancer and want to insert him into every memory of that lab. Also, though, he would have helped because he was that kind of guy.
Then the ultrasound results come in, and it’s an inflamed appendix, not an ovarian cyst, but I still remember that it was my right side. I still remember that it was James who helped me.
RIP James Chaloupka, whose laughter I’ll never forget.