“Sorry, I forgot. I’m just the chauffer.” I knew that he wanted to add “and the cook and the maid.”
“Don’t be that way. I just don’t know what we have yet.”
“But you have something. You could simply share that with me, remind me that I play a role in your life. Say something of interest—after all I have nothing better to do while I wait for rehearsal to be over since I cancelled my cigar night with the boys.”
His timing was masterful, his aim precise, the guilt was surgically extracted. Dead silence.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’ve said that.” He wasn’t going to bail me out.
“What can I do?”
“A little conversation. Less texting like I’m your servant. Make an attempt to connect.”
“You’re right. I just—”
“Fewer excuses.”
We both felt the buzzing of my phone’s timer. Megan’s final run repeating the quantitation of those with different treatments for Addison’s should be ready. The discussion was over.
As he always does, Chris let me off the hook. “Can you plan to hang around a little in the morning so we can spend some time together?”
“Yes, I will. That would be nice.” For a split second I could feel the much-needed shift it would give us.
“And bring your work. I’d like to hear about it. I don’t know if you remember, but I’m a scientist too—I have an interest and might even be able to help.”
“I remember. And I remember that I love you.”
“That would be good too.”
The loud snort woke me. Unfortunately, it was my own. It was a terrible consequence of getting older.
Chris was in the kitchen—no sign of the girls. The clock showed an hour that I rarely saw in my kitchen on a Tuesday. Eight o’clock.
“Wow, did I sleep!”
“Oh, you were sleeping? I thought you were buzz-sawing down a forest, or maybe herding warthogs.”
I ignored his attempt at humor. “Why did you let me sleep so late?”
He shrugged. I supposed it was a rhetorical question.
“Breakfast will be ready in a minute, coffee is out in the sun room. I put the heater on to warm it up a bit.”
I started towards the sliding doors, then changed course for a much-needed connection. I wrapped my arms around him, turning my head slightly so I could feel my whole body connecting with his back and syncing with him.
“I’m sorry,” I offered.
“Thank you,” he accepted.
The sunroom was our escape from the world. From on top of a hill, the view rolled down to a patch of woods on one side, and a pasture with our barn on the other. The bare trees and blanket of fresh snow presented a landscape in grayscale, that equalized my emotions. Here you breathed deeper and your heart rate slowed.
We talked of the girls. Diana apparently had a new crush but he was being held captive by a girl that he didn’t even like but he felt guilty about dumping, and Tess needed new character shoes, black ones.
“You know what those are?” he asked.
“Yes, dance shoes with heels. I can take her this weekend, and the neighbors are having another one of their wine tasting parties Saturday. We should go but we need to promise to keep an eye on each other so we don’t consume so much. Every time we go, I end up with a wine headache the next day.”
“Then drink water.” He made it sound so simple.
“I do, but somehow I keep finding my wine glass filled by someone again so I just keep drinking.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But their wine is always so good, and really expensive. It’s a good thing we walk home.”
“So do the girls have their full rehearsal schedule yet?”
“Yes, I put it on the calendar.”
And on and on . . . the tiny fibers that made up our joint life got stitched back together to patch the holes.
“So, tell me, what have you been up to lately in the lab?” Chris asked, smirking as he knew I’d been waiting for him to bring up my work.
“Oh nothing, you?” I’d play for a while.
“Same old. Any big scientific breakthroughs?”
“Don’t know yet, but something came up yesterday that looks interesting.”
“What does?” His game face slipped and he was no longer playing. “I know you don’t think I can help, but at least humor me. Or do you not want me involved, except as your partner in life.”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?” he asked, with some frustration showing.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the sharing thing altogether.”
“With me?”
“With anyone. After what happened with Kendal and Kate, I don’t want to let anyone know what’s going on until I am certain.”
“Except Neil. Wait, Kate?”
“Oh geez, I forgot to tell you that she is the one who told Kendal about our proposal. It was an accident, but I got a new lab tech because of it.”
“You fired her? When did this happen?”
“No, she quit. Didn’t even give me a chance to talk her out of it. It was months ago.”
“That’s a shame, I liked her . . . Months ago?” He looked at me and it registered with both of us how this one fact illustrated how the gulf between us had widened over the past few months.
“I liked her too,” I said with genuine regret. “Sorry I didn’t tell you.”
We sat in silence for a bit. Finally he leaned forward, putting his folded hands on the table, preparing to fully engage. “Let’s just talk about here and now,” he started.
“If I stop to think about it, it would be nice to be able to talk to someone about it,” I said, admitting it to myself as much as to him. “I really have no one except my lab team and Anna. I could really use some other scientific exchange. I just have to make that leap of faith.”
“I think you made that leap when you married me,” he said, pointing out the obvious. “Look, do you want to be famous?”
“What? No, that’s not why I’m doing this.”
“Really?” He was setting me up for some point he wanted to make. Fine. He deserved the chance to walk me though my thoughts.
“I’m doing this because I want to find out what’s killing these dogs and I want to stop it from happening to others.”
“That’s great, that’s noble—and selfish.”
“I know where you’re going with this.”
“You do? Then tell me, Einstein, how are you going to come up with the theory of relativity all by yourself? Which by the way, he did not do by himself, you know. Michelson, Lorentz, Planck and a bunch of others—But I digress. Why are you chasing down every possible path before bouncing your ideas off others in the field?”
“You’re right. I can’t do this by myself. I shouldn’t do it by myself. I just struggle with how to share the science without losing the edge that will get us some more funding. We're burning through Neil’s money pretty fast.”
“Do what you love, the money will follow, as Lee Iacocca was known to say.”
“Wow, you are Mr. Wikipedia today. I don’t think he was talking about grant money.”
“That’s Dr. Wikipedia.”
“Ah, you point that out for a reason. The reason being that you do have some standing in a discussion about the merits of scientific exchange.”
“I do believe you are on to something!” He’d become that smug kid who answered all the questions, waving his hand to be called on. I bet his teachers had either loved him or hated him.
“You promise you won’t steal my idea and compete for funding?”
He went silent and serious. I was struck by how, no matter how long you have been with someone, there were still triggers that drew emotions when you least expected. “Why so serious?”
He looked over at Ania and Sophie sleeping, curled up on their big chairs, having exhausted themselves with their morning routine of ball chasing and biscuit eati
ng while I slept. “I love those dogs you know,” he said with slight surprise in his voice. “They are a constant smile in this house. I can’t imagine if they get this disease and we lose either of them. I want to help find a cure too. I could care less about any credit or funding.”
I wanted to say I was sorry, but that was all used up. Instead, I acknowledged the obvious by reaching for my computer bag that I brought home the previous night that was somehow miraculously sitting on the table this morning. He was a master of the set-up.
I explained that we had analyzed all the samples of blood that Anna gave us, looking for differences in mRNA, DNA, and proteins in the blood of CRFS and unaffected dogs, the same as the rest of the research community, but there were no obviously noticeable differences between a group of dogs that were affected and different group that were not.
Chris reminded me that it wasn’t a waste of time: negative results were critical at this juncture to understand what was not happening. Still, it was the positive result that gave rise to a surge of adrenaline and created an atmosphere of excitement in the lab and propelled us forward.
I turned on my computer, “but wait.” I opened the file of the sequences Jamie showed me the previous evening and slid my computer in front of him. “We are in a unique position because we can compare samples from the same dog before and after it got CRFS. Anna has been collecting samples from all her Addison’s dogs. In many cases she has samples that cover their lifespan, including after they got CRFS.”
“And you can see a difference before and after they got it?”
“Yes, a slight increase in a mRNA, but so slight that it would have just been assumed to be an anomaly within the standard variation for any two populations of dogs. Except that our populations are pre- and post-disease samples from the same dogs. Also, we see this difference in 100% of same-dog comparisons. Not one that doesn’t show it.”
“Geez. That’s striking.” He stood and tilted the screen upwards, studying the string of letters, then looked at me. “Okay, but what does this have to do with Addison’s?”
“Actually nothing. We think. We just happened to have not only matched sets of samples from normal dogs, but also matched sets from dogs with Addison’s.
“Wait, why did Anna have samples from normal dogs taken before they got CRFS?”
“Well Amazing Anna had the forethought to ask her clients to let her take wellness blood samples early on in this epidemic, so she also had samples from eighteen normal, non-Addison’s dogs, pre- and post-CRFS infection. They have the same type of increase, only ever so slightly lower than the increase we saw with the Addison’s dogs.”
“So just to cover all angles, why hasn’t anyone else seen this?”
“Three reasons. Like I said, the increases we see are so slight that other researchers might not have considered it significant. All those samples sent to CDC would have been from hundreds of different vets, and would likely have inherent variation in processing—like how quickly samples were preserved, and whether there was any degradation, which would obviously cause a change in the amount of mRNA remaining in the sample.”
“And the second reason?"
“Our matched sets with pre-disease samples from the same dogs. I doubt anyone has those, so again, they wouldn’t notice the minor change in mRNA concentration as important.”
“And third?”
“Addison’s dogs. They confirm that CRFS is acting on the HPA system.”
Chris’ mouth dropped open ever so slightly, and he sat back down, still staring at the screen. Sometimes it was painful to listen to the silence of his thinking. I was the type to think somewhat out loud, so people often knew my thoughts in real time. Someone might not be able to follow my circuitous logic, but they would have a sense of how many different directions my thoughts were going. But Chris? For all I know he could have been thinking of when he could reschedule his cigar night. Finally he furrowed his brow and unveiled his thoughts.
“So, you found a transcript of a gene that exists in all dogs, with and without Addison’s. You also know that the number of copies of this transcript is elevated in dogs with CRFS, more so in dogs with Addison’s.”
“Exactly. The really interesting part is the clinical observation that goes along with this.”
“There’s more?” he asked.
“Yes, do you remember me telling you that Anna noticed that the dogs with Addison’s actually succumbed to CRFS slower than the dogs without?”
“You mean faster.”
“No. Slower. Which would indicate that they can stave off the disease a bit longer.”
He registered the fact. “Slower. So they are somewhat protected. What, because of their medication?”
“Yup. The Addison’s dogs are somewhat protected by their daily treatment. So as the normal dogs are starting to succumb to CRFS and their whole HPA system starts to fail, the Addison’s dogs are able to still respond to the stress of CRFS and produce more copies of the mRNA transcript.”
He finally looked away from his study of the sequences and looked me dead on. “What does the sequence look like? Does it match to any known sequence within the HPA?”
“We don’t know. That’s what I was doing when you called last night. Helping set up the comparison to all the sequences in Genbank.”
He hesitated and then relented. “Well played, my love.” An acknowledgment that I might have been justified in staying late. “But you could have just made that today’s work.” He must have registered the disappointment in my face. “Maybe not.”
“Yes we could have, but I wanted the results early this morning—Shit! What time is it?!”
Standing in the shower, scarcely taking the time to rinse the soap out of my hair, he had me trapped. The glass door slid open, and he stepped in.
“If I say I don’t have time, will it ruin the morning?” I asked.
“No. Actually that’s not why I’m here. I just want to remind you I’m here. That I want to help, that I can help,” he said, redirecting the water from my face.
“I know. Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind.” He looked at me with that yeah, right look. “Okay, I will—if you remind me.” He reached for the shampoo.
Damn. He really was there to shower.
Just as I decided to take my time and get ready at a normal pace, my phone rang.
“That was Jamie. He’s identified the sequence. I told him not to say anything till I got there.” My heart was pounding. Chris gave a hopeful smile. I tilted my head and smiled back, “Want to come with me?” I asked. He closed his computer and beat me to the door.
We arrived at the lab to find Jamie kicked back in his chair, feet propped on a pulled-out bench drawer, chatting—no, laughing—with Megan.
“My, you two look positively radiant,” I said, as Chris worked his way past me to shake Jamie and Megan’s hands. They were without gloves in computer analysis mode.
Chris came to my side and put his arm around me.
Jamie was now failing at looking casual.
“Okay,” I said, “spill it. What did you find?”
“We’re on the right track.” His expression became serious. “Like you thought, it’s a gene for a protein that is a critical part of the HPA.”
“You’re sure?” I wasn’t asking for my sake, but for his. He would have to defend the findings soon.
“I can solidly prove it to you. In 100% of the samples. Care to guess which gene?”
I had been thinking all night, but there were more than a dozen possibilities. “I think we don’t have time for me to guess. If this is it, we’re going to need every moment we have to chase this puppy.”
Jamie looked at Megan and nodded for her to do the honors. “There’s an increase in the glucocorticoid receptor transcript.”
“Really? The GR? That’s the most ubiquitous component of the HPA. It’s present all over the body! It’s what stands ready to activate and shuttle stress response hormones wherever they are needed. Fuck wi
th that gene and—”
“You’re fucked,” Chris concluded. Jamie and Megan grinned.
“Whoa,” was all I could come up with. Jamie and Megan obviously had processed the observation and had moved from shock to planning our next move.
Chris was right, mess with GR and you are done for. We knew that this normal gene was in overdrive as a result of CRFS, and we knew this caused a deadly cascade of responses resulting in 100% mortality.
We called Anna. When I told her what Jamie found, I felt the weight of the next round of decisions. Did we let the rest of the scientific community know, or did we keep it to ourselves, for just a little longer? Would that be selfish or unethical? Anna made the executive decision to give us a few more weeks, defined more by our need to work through a few more steps of discovery rather than by an arbitrary, self-imposed deadline. I wasn’t as confident as she was in our chances of making any great strides in the next few weeks—it had taken us three months to find the GR anomaly, and knowing the effect was far different from discovering the cause. But we were collaborators and she was the most confident in her position, so I wasn’t about to argue with her. In truth I wanted to press on, wanted us to be “the ones,” but the cost in dog lives as the days ticked by was daunting. We owed it to the dogs to chase this hard and fast.
But we owe them so much more.
We owe dogs a lifetime of care. Our domestication of their species comes with that promise.
We owe them food since we have bred out much of their hunting instinct, at least in most breeds, leaving them with no real knowledge of hunting and killing for survival. We selected out the extraordinary teeth and jaws of the wolf that allow them to shatter bones and shear through meat. While Ania and Sofie are relentless hunters of moles, and frogs, and baby birds, they are only in it for fun. And for praise; they demand praise when they present their quarry. Feral dogs rarely are found running through the woods looking for bunnies and small game, but instead they wander the cities and urban environments scrounging for scraps out of human refuse.
We owe dogs shelter, and a clean, safe space for them to nest, though it doesn’t have to be on the bed that mine are convinced they are entitled to. It is estimated that dogs spend twelve to fourteen hours—half their lives—sleeping, up to a tenth of it in a deep, REM sleep. On a good day, when food is plentiful, wolves will sleep for a third of the day, but rarely do they sleep deeply. To survive, dogs need a place to call home where they can snuggle in. Our domestication has ingrained in them the need to be close to us to feel at home, regardless of whether we actually care for them. Abandoned dogs don’t typically dig dens for themselves, but instead they eke out an existence under human discards.
Decoded Dog Page 17