He answered the phone on the second ring.
“Hey,” I said.
“I thought you were still angry with me, haven’t heard from you for over a month,” Neil stated flatly.
“I am.”
“Didn’t get a Christmas card.”
“No one did.”
“Okay. What’s up?”
“I need your help. I’m not sure what’s going on, but Anna has a bunch of dead dogs and she’s made a curious observation in Addison’s dogs that have CRFS.”
“Are the two related?” he asked, pushing aside the silence of the last few months.
“We don’t know. Don’t think so, but the Addison’s dogs could be key to figuring out the progression, and maybe even the trigger of the disease.”
“Why?”
“Because they actually survive CRFS longer since they receive adrenal hormones. It has to be related to the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal system. Would it be possible to talk to your friends at Regnum about their interest in supporting this?”
“You don’t want to talk to them. They’ve invested too much on the other ideas. They are not going to entertain a whole new theory.”
“It’s not a theory, it’s a fact. We have proof.” Was he doubting me?
“Okay, slow down. Tell me what you have.”
“Anna’s had more than 139 dogs she thinks died of CRFS, including some that had Addison’s. She’s been sending CRFS samples to the CDC bank, which then go to big pharma—who, by the way, are hampering the effort to solve this by paying vets to provide samples exclusively to them. She’s not taking their offer, though. Just another seedy reality of the race for a cure.”
“Stick to the facts.”
I rolled my eyes, willing him to see over the phone. “That is a fact. But luckily, some long-term relationships still count for something, and Anna also keeps samples for me.”
“Relevant facts, please.”
“The symptoms of CRFS are similar to Addison’s—lethargy, loss of appetite, quick death. It seems to attack the adrenals, much like Addison’s. All the CRFS dogs eventually die from the effects of adrenal failure. But—even though Addison’s dogs are also dying of CRFS, they die slower, taking three to five days instead of the one to three. Anna thinks this is because they are receiving supplements to replace the adrenal hormones. Non-Addison’s dogs quickly go into an Addison’s-like crash and die before anyone can even have a chance to treat the symptoms from adrenal failure to total organ failure. On the other hand, with the Addison’s dogs that get CRFS, she is able to see a much clearer and slower progression as it slowly affects the other organs. She is able to see the progression of the disease because they are the only ones that are only mildly sick during the first phase.”
“All of them? That’s pretty significant.”
“I know. She is even keeping the Addison’s dogs alive a bit longer because she can catch it in the early stage and increase their adrenal supplements, though there is still 100% mortality.”
“So has her insight into the progression given her any leads on the cause?” he said with excitement rising in his voice.
“Not yet. There are so many things to look at, but she’s been storing samples on all of the dogs since they were first diagnosed with Addison’s, and each time they came in for a checkup. So she has pre-and post-CRFS samples for all of her Addison’s dogs that have died of CRFS. I’m going spend the next week before break is over organizing my thoughts and planning our research forward. Maybe then we could talk about the next steps.”
“Can you define ‘we’?”
“Anna. My lab staff. Me . . . You.”
“And my role as part of ‘we’ is?”
“I don’t have any money for this. I can dip into my Addison’s grant to look into this a little because there is this anomaly in the Addison’s dogs, but I can’t ethically spend much more without knowing that it will be paid back. I can’t take it any further without dedicated funding. That’s why I’m calling you. That’s why I need to talk to Regnum.”
There was a long pause on the phone. Uncomfortably long during which my mind ran through every possible excuse he was going to give.
“Claire, you can’t go to them. You can’t trust them.”
“Coming from you, isn’t that a bit ironic?”
“Stop it. Let me make some calls and get back to you. I will get you the money, just not from them. You can trust me,” he said tersely.
I could picture his stoic face at the Regnum ceremony, and let my exasperation show. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. I can’t go down this road with you again.”
“You called me, remember? You were thinking that we might still have something to salvage. Look, I have enough investors who are willing to take a chance on any recommendation I give them. I can make some calls, and pull together a proposal in a matter of days to secure some venture capital.”
“And you’ll take your cut if it ends up profitable, right?”
“Have your lawyer draw it up however you want to define my role, or exclude me all together. You might want to consider that sometimes your stubbornness prevents you from seeing that you might not know the whole story.”
Accepting that I was being a bit of a jerk, I said, “I really don’t care about profit. You’re free to make a living. I just want to figure this thing out.”
“But not be rich and famous?”
“Not funny. Becoming famous for being the one that figured it out wouldn’t be so bad, since it would mean that they stop dying, and more money would flow into Addison’s research.”
“You can trust me, Claire. I won’t let you down.”
“Except once,” I said before I could stop myself.
The house was quiet except for the muffled pitter-patter of Sofie’s feet as she danced around me. Ania stood in the hallway, sleepy-eyed, her tail slowly waving a tired welcome. “I’ll be there in a minute,” I told her. She acknowledged and turned and headed down the hall. Sofie trotted alongside me to the kitchen to help me get a glass of water.
I prefer to have overlapping dogs—to feel the ebb and flow of untrained enthusiasm mixed with obedience that serves a mutual purpose.
There is freshness in the over-exuberance, generic puppy response. In puppy feet that know no boundaries, and the bright-eyed eager way the young look for meaning in words, facial expressions, and voice inflection. They remind us to find joy in the simple and the silly. A young dog brings hope.
But there is comfort in the maturity of an old dog whose ways we know; we are adapted to fit together. There is a merging of our spirits as she reads me, and I her. There is a silent exchange between the two of us as we move through our days. An old dog gives me indescribable peace.
One does not replace the other—the old for the young—as people who get a puppy soon after losing their old friend often realize. It takes time to build a life together, to reach a stasis.
It is like that with people too, I reminded myself on the dark drive home. Relationships built over years offered comfort in familiarity and granted concessions without asking. I needed to remember to not bite when a growl will do.
BACK TO BORNEO
I DON’T dwell on their last moments. I try only to remember them vibrant, loving, and healthy. I have let go of many; ones that lived long lives, then one day stopped eating and told me it was time and then helped me walk through the process of acceptance as I helped them leave this world. Others, the young ones, laid a heavy stone on my chest as I struggle, still, to process their leaving. We named one Butterfly. She was just two days old when her lungs filled with fluid and she grew weak. There was no final decision, it was just as it needed to be, but painfully unfair. I have let go of many, but have never forgotten one.
I couldn’t get the vision at Anna’s clinic out of my head, I couldn’t sleep. Dogs, the love of someone’s life, so many dogs, so many broken hearts. I didn’t even know what day of the week it was. I just knew I couldn�
�t watch without doing something. It was one week before the students returned, leaving little time to get everything set up. I would have to ask them to dive into analyzing Anna’s samples right away, ignoring their own research, though that would be unfair to ask of them. They needed to concentrate on their work so they could graduate sometime in the near future, maybe even on time. But I knew that neither Jamie or Megan would put their work before this. Was I being a responsible adviser even asking them?
I headed to the lab before anyone woke up. I left a note saying I would only be in the lab for a few hours. I just needed to get Anna’s spreadsheets organized, as well as my thoughts. There was so much to do. I had to set up the lab like a factory for processing the samples. I had to assign duties and everything had to be well-coordinated to ensure that samples were processed quickly, and kept at the right temperature throughout so nothing would degrade.
I needed someone to research any new information on other diseases that started by killing off the adrenal glands, though I pretty much knew them by heart. Someone had to separate the samples allocating portions for protein and DNA extraction. Then someone had to start running the screening for each. What was I thinking? I needed help. I had to pull in some of the other labs in our department. Dr. Martenson’s lab down the hall was the only one equipped for toxicology. At least we already had data on all of the animals, with complete blood chemistry profiles, so we knew how their bodies were functioning, or rather were failing to function. We could ignore things like urea, nitrogen, and creatinine levels; we only needed to look for things that were novel and fell outside of known physiological responses.
Over the next week I was in the lab, every day, all day, by myself. Okay, I lied to Chris, or made false promises at least. The day after seeing Anna and the dead dogs, I got home around dinnertime, but I did stop by to pick up something so we could at least have a family dinner. I had called Chris earlier in the day to tell him what happened. As I described in detail the dogs laying still in Anna’s clinic, a flood of tears poured out of me. I couldn’t exactly read his silence on the phone, but I chose to believe it was because he grasped the magnitude of the situation and was processing through to accepting that our agreement to limit my hours was off.
“Do you understand why I have to be here?”
“Yes,” Chris said. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it. “He paused like he does so often, to turn his words around. “I’m so sorry. I know that must have been awful.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry too that it’s going to pull me away for a while. I’ll make sure to not work over the weekend so we can spend time together with the girls.”
“At least call them. Let them know you’re there if they need you. I don’t want them to feel like you’re sequestered with no contact with the outside world.”
“Maybe you could bring them by?” I suggested.
“They would rather stick forks in their eyes than have to pretend any interest in our lab work. You know that,” he countered.
“You’re right, at least your lab has cool vats of little fishes.”
“Yes, way cooler than water baths and incubators. Good luck,” he said. “I’ll miss you.”
“I love you,” I said as he hung up.
“I found you some money,” Neil stated.
“Do I want to know from whom and what it is going to cost me?”
“Well, I have two contributors. Basically, what I propose is that we set you up as an equal investment partner, contributing your research in-kind. I’ll be contributing most of the funding.”
“You?” My emotions were mixed.
“Yes. I have money from my settlement with Regnum that I’ve been looking to invest. I can’t think of a better cause.”
“Guess you really do love those dogs of yours, don’t you?”
“Yes, and you. The other investor is Johnathan Oros.”
“The guy who was the CSO at Regnum before you?” I asked, a bit surprised.
“Yeah, he’s a friend now. He started his own company and we talk often about the plusses and minuses of owning your own business. His company, though small, has a few grants to work on two orphan diseases. You know, those that very few people have and only the federal government will invest in. They pay enough to keep the lights on. But he also is an FDA contract lab and is set up to test and produce vaccines during national emergencies. If your findings pan out, he thinks he can get FDA to give him approvals quickly to move through the phases of any clinical trials that need to be done on a vaccine or treatment, so you can get it out to the public quickly. He is willing to provide some of his own investment money and set you up as part owner in his company so you’ll share in anything that comes of this.”
“Wow, that’s a sweet deal . . . um, but . . .”
“You don’t need to justify taking a share. It’s okay to make money. I learned that long ago. You academics can pretend that the two are not heavily intertwined until a great discovery slips through your hands and someone else makes money on it. Then you want to cry foul.”
“I was just going to say thanks.”
“That will do. But it will cost you one more thing.”
“My heart and soul?” I asked.
“Close.; Our friendship. I want that back, and in better condition than it was when you gave it up.”
“I gave it up?” I asked incredulously, but caught myself. “Can I give it to you in installments? I don’t know if I can afford the whole thing right away.”
“All or nothing. That’s the deal,” he said pointedly.
“I—”
“I’m serious. I know you are still angry—some of it may be justified because I didn’t warn you, but the rest is not. But if we’re going to do this together you need to drop the anger that perfuses every conversation. You women can hold a grudge awfully long.”
“And you men can stir up the deepest of emotions with your silence.”
“I miss you too. Love you, all that crap. Now let’s get busy. I’m having my lawyer pull together a legal agreement for us in the next day or two, and in the meantime I’ll be working with my finance guy to set up a funding stream. Don’t know if we need to set up a foundation or what, but let me worry about that.” He paused. “Claire, friend to friend, how sure of this are you?”
“Now you’re asking?” I laughed. “As sure as we can be that we are on to something significant, whether we can find it with our small team or whether we will need a lot more help remains to be seen.”
“My money’s on you,” he assured me. “Make sure your staff have non-disclosures.”
“Already thought of that. When they come back from vacation Anna and I plan to meet with them and have them all sign a non-disclosure agreement.” I smiled to myself. “See I can think like a business woman even if I am just a researcher.”
“Never doubted that. I’ll try to involve you as little as needed in the paperwork process so you can concentrate on the work, but you will have to meet with Jim at least once to finalize the agreement. Can you get away for an afternoon to go to Philly to meet him in the next few days?”
“Sure, just say when.”
The Acela express train up the East Coast forces you to think. It can be crowded or you can luck out and get an empty row, but it is quiet and rhythmic, and a respite from the outside world. After reading the newspaper and catching up on emails, motivation ebbs, scenery floats past, the mind wanders, and things that matter surface for clarity. Why anyone would hopscotch up the East Coast in a plane baffles me. How much further is Canada? I contemplated the possibility of riding off to a new country, a new life, devoid of dead dogs and needed work to rekindle my marriage.
As sure as I was that I married for life, I was also sure that there were risks to that life being a happy one. It would have been easy to push my marriage off a cliff. Not by a freight train barreling into it and splintering the foundation, but by slow, quiet, collective deterioration as the mechanics of the day replace meaningful interaction.
By taking advantage, failing to appreciate, carelessly tossing around harsh words. Big events happen in all marriages that temporarily distract—children enter, illnesses invade, careers demand, children leave. But you have to keep clearing a path around those big rocks to keep the flow. I could see it, I knew it, but I couldn’t seem to focus on the anything but the mounding debris. We had moved so far away from the rhythm of the sailboat that brought us together many years ago.
Sipadan island lies 35km off the northeast coast of Borneo. Tourists traveled there back then by a converted fishing boat, whose engine roared and billowed diesel exhaust for three hours solid.
The water changed from light to dark deep blue as we left the continental shelf of the Semporna archipelago for the depth of the Celebes Sea. I watched this breathtaking transition while facing the water, lying on the deck, retching my guts out as the boat cavorted over wave after wave, joyously laughing at me as it played with what was left of the contents of my stomach. I couldn’t imagine life continuing. I wanted nothing more than for the boat to heel just enough for me to slide into the water, sending me into the cool depths and Davy Jones’ arms. But it was not to be. The boat crew would not have it, bad for business, and they sustained my life by bringing me small cups of foul-tasting water and saying “drink, drink” in thickly accented English. And I did. All the while knowing that in about a day, I might pay dearly for allowing a new mixture of foreign microbes to explore my digestive system. Though I threw most of it up. The blue below beckoned.
We arrived to an overly cheery bunch of Malaysian greeters, their smiling voices announcing “Welcome to Sipadan” as they scraped me off the boat deck and laid me on the dock alongside several others who barely survived our adventure. A bowl of plain white rice appeared in front of me—“eat, eat”—and I did, and within minutes I was sitting up, able to focus, and taking in the smiling hopeful faces of my hosts. This was obviously a common ritual.
Sipadan straddles Malaysian and Indonesian territorial waters, and at the time there was a dispute over who owned it. The Malaysians had been the first to overtly claim it, establishing a diving operation and tourist attraction there, and eventually they were awarded ownership by an international court in 2002. There was only one permanent resident on the island, an old turtle egg hunter who was allowed to continue to collect and sell turtle eggs by permission and limitations of the government, leaving the remaining hatchlings to emerge from the sand as little pancakes with finned feet struggling back to the sea in the hope of continuing the species.
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