When I graduated from undergrad, I believed I was a
chemist. But I was limited to a very small town for two years. That
confinement was the price paid for the second best thing that ever happened to
me. That limitation made it very hard to find a proper job for someone
who, mere weeks before, had been working advanced quantum mechanical equations
and arguing about gene expression mechanisms with professors.
My dear readers that are young, enjoy the academic
atmosphere while you can, or find a way to remain a student forever.
The whole second-best-thing-that-ever-happened to me
required a roof and food. I needed a job. I looked for a job.
Looking became a job that did not pay. I rapidly was forced to search for
jobs outside of chemistry. For 3 weeks, I worked as an office person in a
supermarket, for about $1 an hour over minimum. With a BS in
biochemistry, yo. That is called “taking me down a few notches” in, in
Christian language, I was being humbled. very humbled.
Hoping for better pay, better benefits, better hours, and
some degree of self-respect, I took a job at the local hospital in the
pathology department as a clerk. I did find better hours, but that was
it. I was not going to be a pathologist, or even a lab tech (although I
had more developed lab skillz than our two lab techs, I did not have any sheets
of paper that said I had the requite skillz). And here, my story proper
begins.
We lived in an area where there were lots of ex-farmers and
hill-rods who what stopped doing farm work and moonshine-ing to sit in AC,
collected government benefits and watch whatever garbage was popular on TV in
those days. They did not, however, alter their diets from the days of
doing farm work or moonshine-ing. As a result, there was epic obesity in
that area. I don’t mean most folks were modestly overweight either.
It was EPIC. And, type II diabetes chaises epic obesity like the ladies
used to chase me. Actually, it was more an inverse relationship.
When you got any kind of blood issues, you just gotta check
yo feet. Daily, to make sure nothing nasty is going on down there.
When you are epically obese, you can’t see your feet, so you don’t check
them. And then a scratch becomes an infection, and they don’t notice
until one day, they take their shoes off and wretch from the odor of decay (no,
this is not my general hyperbole). At that point, it’s too late to save the
leg, so at the hospital I worked at, we were cutting off legs like it was a
Tyson Chicken Factory in late January. Gross. Part of my job was
to, several times a day, cruse around the hospital to collect things that had
been cut off or out of people. Legs, for some reason, went to the
Morgue. Deadleg.
One day, I got a call from the morgue that a leg had
arrived. I walked down there to pick it up, and found a large, lawn-trashbag
sized red “biohazard” bag with the telltale outline of a leg. (I’m dying
right now, remembering this. There are just some things I’d like to
unsee). A large (epic, remember?) leg. I hoist it up, and, with a
level arm at shoulder height, start back to the pathology office. Oh my
grosh, the mass. I can’t hold this up forever, it’s got to weigh like, 50
lbs. So, against my will and better judgment, my arm weakens and
eventually is mostly perpendicular to the floor.
At this point, I am kicked in my butt. I turn around
ready to drop the leg and throw down. The leg would have made a good
club, except that the heel might well have reduced to pink mist owing to the
extensive decay of the hard and soft tissue. There is no one there.
I turn back around, and then it (realization) hits me. I have just been
kicked in the ass by a disembodied leg.
It is impossible to describe what goes through one’s mind at moments
like this. See, my stride matched the twisting vibrational frequency of
the leg in the bag. As I walked, the small swing of the leg was amplified
by my gait, and the amplitude of the swing increased, until the foot connected
to the leg, swung around a bashed me. “The knee bone connected to the leg
bone/the leg bone connected to the foot bone / the food bone connected to my
backside”
_-*ARRRRRGHHHHHHH!!!!!*-_
Another day, I picked up a specimen in a jar of
“formalin.” The jars had adhesive labels that wrapped most of the way
around the jar, but there was a small window through which you could see
whatever was in there. Sometimes, I think it was a window into
hell. By this point, I had been around long enough to have the general procedure
of not looking into those jars, but one day…Part of my job was to type
the specimen description into a database, and I typed in: “left eye and ~1/2
optic nerve.”
I simply could not believe it. I just had to
look. Why? Because I was 22 and less than intelligent. I
rotated that jar around to take a look into “the window to hell” and saw an
eye. Alone. Looking straight back at me. I was frozen
in horror. It was like a bad movie. It WAS a bad movie. I
was wide-eyed, and waiting for this thing to blink. It’s not going to
blink, man. It was my Mordor moment. “A great eye, lidless
and wreathed in formalin.” Yea, Saruman, bite me.
_-*ARRRRRGHHHHHHH!!!!!*-_
Similar to the “eye” incident, one day, we got the
finger. There is much less to write, but for some reason, I had to take
the lid off the jar. There it floated, bobbing up and down like a fishing
bob. It was pointing at me, accusingly, like “the thing” from Addam’s
Family. What had I done, I wondered? To this day, I assume I must
have offended it by opening the jar without knocking first.
