Decoded Dog

by Dianne Janczewski

  It wasn’t until we had a semester under our belts that we connected.

  The first day back from break, Sunday, it snowed in the morning, blanketing the campus in white glimmering speckles that smiled in the afternoon sun. Sidewalks were hidden, the bushes made soft lumps under the covers, and conversations were muffled as we settled in to start the next term. Roommates huddled in their rooms sharing vacation stories and modeling Christmas presents.

  The first day of class was dreary and overcast; the snow had turned to gray slush that lay dying on the streets. Each academic building greeted us with a wet, dirty entrance; sloppy footprints left by oversized winter boots trailed down the halls. “Welcome back,” the doors cragged as they slammed shut behind us.

  But the dreary quickly brightened as I entered my biology class. Anna sat front and center, with one empty seat beside her. Mine to claim. I slid in. “How was your vacation?” I asked.

  “Great, mostly family stuff. We spent a week skiing in Vermont. But it was so hard to leave. My dog is old and I don’t think she’ll be there the next time I go home.” I could see the pain in her eyes, but she brightened and asked me about my break.

  “It was great. I have dogs too, three of them. My mom breeds poodles and the puppies are always fun—well, at least until they get teeth. I’m bummed though. I’ll be here when the next litter is born. And this will be Abby’s last litter.”

  “Oh, that is a bummer. Puppies, how sweet, I’d love to see pictures!” No cell phones back then, so we stopped by my room after class to go through my box of puppy photos I kept on hand for down moments. She told me she liked my glasses. “Are they new?” she asked. They were, and she had noticed.

  Two weeks later she stood in the doorway of my room, barely able to speak, her face red and wet with tears. “My mom called. She had to put Penny down.” We walked for hours in the cold, cried together, and laid the foundation to be best friends. The dog bond is strong, even when it’s person to person.

  It took time, but I came to know Anna well. Though it seemed as if she knew everyone and everyone knew her, it was all an illusion brought on by everyone’s wish to know her. In reality, she was confident, looked you in the eyes and said hello, but she was very private. She kept everyone at bay, engaging in and eliciting small talk by asking about their lives. Distracted by self-absorption, they never noticed she revealed little about herself.

  We roomed together over the next three years. Both majoring in Biology, we planned classes together and scheduled a rotation of days off when the other one would take notes. We spent summers together, fell in love with the wrong men, comforted each other with potato chips, sappy movies, and bitch sessions, and held on tight as the world around us spun. We listened to Little Feat, watched Mork and Mindy, and covered for each other—bad dates, meddling parents, nosy students, lecherous professors—we had each other’s back. When Anna was accepted to vet school I felt like a parent: so excited for her, and proud to have been part of her success. We drove down to Virginia Tech a month before school started to find her a place to live. We hiked the Blue Ridge, went tubing on the New River, and said goodbye knowing it would never be the same.

  “I can’t imagine not spending every day with you,” I said, feeling weighed down by the reality. “Who’s gonna actually think I’m funny?”

  “I know! I keep thinking, who’s going to let me have the last scoop of ice cream in the box? And will I just be eating the whole carton myself? Am I going to get fat because you’re gone?” She looked startled with the realization.

  We both laughed as we acknowledged that we had, as usual, both had the same thought.

  It would never be the same with Anna and me, but in many ways it became better as we grew into our careers and ourselves. She finished vet school, moved to a small town in Virginia, and went to work for a small animal vet who was willing to mentor her. When he retired, as luck would have it—okay, maybe that’s not the right way to put it—but at just about the same time, her grandmother passed away and she bought the practice from him with her small inheritance. I fell a few years behind her trying to get a job with a BS in Biology; a tough road for even those who are really bright, unlike I. Finally I settled into graduate school.

  It was an exciting time when breakthrough technologies in genetics were just being invented. PCR amplification—the ability to rapidly duplicate small pieces of DNA in a test tube—opened the door for a slew of new analyses. Within ten years the stage would be set for determining the entire sequence of DNA for an individual species—the genome—hundreds of thousands to billions of bases long. The promise of a DNA blueprint would significantly aid in discovering the genetic causes of diseases and revolutionize the field of medicine, making it even harder for me to decide what I wanted to be some day.

  So I thought I’d start with what I loved, dogs, and managed to make my way to a lab where the study of canine evolution was booming. Unfortunately, once I got there I found out that other, more senior graduate students and postdocs had dibs on all the dog work. So I was assigned research to determine the evolutionary relationships between the thirty-seven species in the Felidae family. I couldn’t imagine it going anywhere, but tried to find an interest in cats. After all, DNA all looked the same, whether a glob of goo on the end of a glass rod or on the computer screen as a string of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs. But the mere mention outside of the lab about my work invariably brought out anecdotal stories of pet cats. “You work on cats? Oh my Jasper is so funny, he always wakes me by smacking my face!” I grinned politely, and tried to appreciate what cats gave to their owners. I had never owned a cat and was admittedly ignorant of their value, and often wondered if I was missing out on something. I did get to trek through the jungle to help collect field samples with some of the exotic cat researchers, and their dedication shed light on the wonders of the cat family. But was a dog person.

  To survive graduate school, the long laboratory research hours, the coursework, and the demands of my major professor and committee members, I got my first standard poodle, Izzy. Having grown up with a miniature, I knew I needed the intellect of a poodle, but I wanted something more substantial to wrap my arms around. When Izzy was around two years old my temporary roommate sought comfort at the animal shelter in the form of a big, sweet mutt. Izzy was not happy, but more than that, she began to slip away. Ever so slightly at first, she became more snuggly, more sensitive, less interested in food. Within a week she crashed, barely able to lift her head, and I was lucky enough to have a vet who instantly knew what was wrong when I described the symptoms and she looked at the breed. Addison’s had been slowly destroying her adrenal gland, and the stress of a new dog accelerated full onset.

  The diagnosis of Addison’s involved injecting the brain chemical, ACTH, that stimulates the adrenal glands, and measuring the production of adrenaline in response. Within a week of treatment she was back to normal, but she would need monthly injections of replacement hormones to substitute for cortisol, and a daily dose of prednisone to help balance blood potassium and sodium for the rest of her life. Maintaining the required low-stress lifestyle was the easy part, as she had a gentle personality that enticed everyone to open a spot on the couch for her.

  As I neared the end of graduate school, Izzy’s disease gave me purpose. “I’m thinking about going into Addison’s research,” I told Anna.

  “I’m in! I’ll get samples from my patients, and get my colleagues to do the same, and we can apply for grants!”

  I eventually established my independence at the university with a grant for a postdoc from a veterinary pharmaceutical company that makes Addison’s treatment drugs. Anna and I were named as co-principal investigators.

  Anna was my best friend, the first one I told my secrets to. The first one I told about Chris.

  Landing in Los Angeles from Malaysia, I had a six-hour layover until my morning flight home. Anna would not forget to pick me up, but I had to call her anyway, had to tell her.

  “An
na, pick up the phone! Are you there?” Her answering machine patiently recorded my frantic message. “Anna, I have to. .”

  “Of course I’m here, it’s the middle of the night. Are you okay?”

  “Oh yeah, hi, just wanted to make sure you’ll be there to meet me, and I have to tell you … Uh, sorry, how are you?”

  “I was asleep. Nice try, yes, I’ll be there, and you have to tell me what?” Maybe I should have called Neil instead, I thought. He was a night owl.

  “That I have met the most amazing man, on an island in the middle of the ocean . . .”

  “Um, okay. I must be dreaming—or you are. That couldn’t wait a few hours? Should I pour myself some coffee?”

  Obviously I hadn’t thought this through. I had to tell her the moment I got home, and for me that meant the moment my feet were back in the States. I didn’t factor in the West Coast layover, the time difference, and the hours left still to travel. It would have cost way too much to explain it all on the phone, and I didn’t have that much change, but now she was awake and not likely to go back to sleep.

  “Guess I just wanted to share.”

  “Uh-huh. “

  Trying to justify myself, I said, “If I had been there I would have been knocking on your door right now.”

  “And you would have gotten the same sleepy response.”

  “Okay, so go back to sleep.”

  “How about you just set the scene for me and tell me the rest on the long ride home.”

  And there she was, standing at the back of the crowd as I came through security, holding what used to be a big sunflower, its dead eye hanging towards the floor surrounded by limp dark yellow eyelashes.

  “For me?!” I smiled brightly. “How beautiful and thoughtful.”

  “Yes, I brought it to reflect my enthusiasm for your homecoming.” She handed it to me as it flopped over.

  For the next two hours I talked and she listened. She always knew when to validate, when to offer fixes, and when to stop the crazy. She was silent mostly, asking a question here and there. Then she turned on me.

  “So let me get this straight. You met the perfect guy half way around the world who lives on the East Coast, somewhere in Virginia, but he never gave you his contact information, nor did you give him yours. He claims to have spent the last year sailing around the world, meeting all kinds of people, including, he modestly admitted, many women who he managed to not have sex with until he met you, conveniently at the end of his year-long boondoggle. And now, you think that it would be a good idea to pay this guy a visit, uninvited, to see if you can recreate the unimaginable fantasy of your romantic four-day tryst on a tropical island. And somehow this new romance will fit right in with your finishing your graduate degree.”

  “You are a dream crusher.”

  “And you are an unrealistic hopeless dreamer, but I love you anyway.”

  “You too.”

  We went silent, me not wanting to admit that she was right, she having said enough.

  “Geez,” Anna finally said in an I’m-rolling-my-eyes-at-you tone. “Why can’t you just accept that it was a wonderful experience that you’ll always remember fondly? Why does it have to be something more?”

  “I don’t know, Catholic guilt?” I suggested.

  “You’re not a practicing Catholic anymore”

  “Yes, but it’s like being an alcoholic, you never leave it behind completely. So I’m a recovering Catholic.” As I acquiesced to her truth my shoulders dropped slightly. “I guess I just want to continue believing in spontaneous generation of love.”

  “Pasteur disproved that long ago. There is nothing there. It was a wonderful, fleeting moment. Move on.”

  “Pasteur’s research only applied to maggots. And you, have you taken your own advice? You’ve been rather silent this whole way about your escapades while I was gone. What’s the status with Greg?”

  “I have been silent because you haven’t stopped talking,” she said, gently reminding me of my bad habit of taking advantage of her polite silences. “Done, gone, moved on. At least he has. Saw him the other day at Morgan’s sharing a dessert with his latest.”

  “Really? Do you know her? Did he see you? Did it bother you?”

  “I don’t care. Really. It actually didn’t bother me like I thought it would. Surprised me, but didn’t bother me.”

  Anna was destined to be single. I often wondered how it was that we could be so close; she let me know everything she was thinking, told it like it was, but she could never do the same with men. She suffered from having an aloof father, whom she always tried to please, and managed to find and fall for men of the same type. Men who liked the idea of a relationship, particularly at the beginning when she was there to please, but the backpedaling always seemed to start when she showed the slightest sign of needing them, rare as that was. She would finally open the door a crack and invite them in, and they would wonder what happened to the woman who needed nothing from them, as they bolted for the door. A man who wanted an equal partner in both intellect and need would be perfect, but those never seemed to find a way into her life.

  I would eventually marry, have two beautiful daughters, and live the family life. Anna did marry, briefly, then found solace in her practice.

  Together we would take on a killer disease, or two.

  I sat quietly in my office waiting for my daughter Tess. Jamie and Megan were entranced in their work, and I perused the internet looking for any news of more cases of dog show-related deaths. Nothing since the initial reports three weeks ago.

  Having successfully indoctrinated at least one of our daughters into considering a career in science, it was a proud mom moment last spring when she came bounding into the kitchen with an Eppendorf vial containing a white glob of her DNA floating in alcohol hanging on a yarn necklace. “Look at me!” she announced, holding it up.

  But her high school couldn’t afford to take them much beyond the basics in molecular biology, so being the pushy mom that I am, I connected her to a lab at the university willing to help her come up with a project for this year’s science fair. Since the beginning of August, she had donned a lab coat once a week and become a university researcher, creating a new bond between us.

  Like a refreshing gust of wind she blew through the lab entry. “Mom! Look what I made!” she announced as she excitedly shoved a picture at me—a close up, 4x6 color photo of a beautiful Drosophila melanogaster head. Her creation, a red-eyed, straight-winged, fruit fly with legs growing out of its head where its antennae should be.

  “Ah, learning to play God are you?”

  “Mom, staaahp, this is so cool. Did you know that Drosophila have these cassettes of genes called homeoboxes? They’re kind of like train cars that each make up a different segment of the fly, and you can turn them off and on, and rearrange them to make antennae grow out of their heads, or double sets of wings, or . . .”

  “Not to be a mutant crusher my love, but you know that that is not the intended purpose of genetic research, right?”

  “Yeah, I get that it’s kind of icky, but it’s so cool how you can see the how the promoter region of the gene acts like a switch, and just by blocking it at the right time, the segment gets messed up! There’re so many genes and promoter switches. So many places where things can get screwed up. It’s amazing that anything ever comes out normal!”

  I gave her language a pass since she was parroting her mother. I could see Megan and Jamie eavesdropping through spaces between reagent bottles.

  “So I guess you’ll never see those little buggers flying around our bananas the same way again.”

  “I know! They’ve been studied for over 100 years and they’re the best understood animal model and research on them has shown how genes are organized and inherited and expressed! They’ve been used to study development, neurology, immunology …”

  “And they’re the only animal model you’re allowed to work on for the science fair.”

  “Actually, I could
have done Planaria but who wants to sit and watch a flatworm grow a new butt? Drosophila are so perfect. Short lifespan, easy to raise, simple inheritance.”

  “Speaking of promoters, did you learn about the TATA box?”

  “You mean the DNA sequence at the beginning of most promoters?”

  I nodded.

  “I did, but you know homeoboxes don’t have those, right?” Tess sounded appalled at my potential ignorance.

  “Yeah, so I’m surprised you learned about them, but glad. They’re fairly common.”

  “I think Mathew, the creepy graduate student I told you about, just wanted to say TATA in front of me. But I just listened and didn’t give him the satisfaction of reacting.” She looked me straight on and genuinely hugged me. “Thanks, Mom.”

  As we walked to the car, Tess chatted non-stop, alternating between a budding scientist and teenaged whack-a-mole. I contemplated the emerging young woman beside me, as I moved in slow motion to register this milestone.

  “So Mom, I know that Drosophila are a lot simpler than a dog, but why is it so difficult to find the gene for Addison’s if you have so many samples of dogs with it?”

  “For starters, dogs have fifteen times the number of bases in their DNA—two and a half billion, and close to twenty thousand protein coding genes—nearly double the number in Drosophila.”

  “Yeah, but still there are so many laboratory techniques and computer algorithms,” the scientist said.

  “And, Addison’s is likely either be multi-genic, meaning caused by interaction of multiple genes—”

  “I know what that is, Mom,” the teenager said.

  “Or it could result from mutations that occur at a number of sites along a gene, so it’s not caused by the same thing in every animal. Or both multi-genic and multi-site. Not to mention that in higher animals like the dog, there’s a larger proportion of DNA that doesn’t directly code for a protein, but instead controls expression, or may just maintain order in the DNA so everything can interact directly. There’s a lot more, as in millions of bases, for your generation to still figure out.”