Daily Excerpt: From Deep Within (Lewis): Selection from Kew Gardens - From Mental Health to Laboratory to Mental Health
Excerpt from From Deep Within; selection from Kew Gardens:
The
grounds of the mental health center were lovely, but the patients who wandered
them seemed lost. The dangers of smoking were not yet known, and everyone in
the hospital smoked, including me. The patients’ fingers were tainted yellow
from the tar, their fingernails were long and unattended, and their clothing
was mismatched and tattered. My heart broke watching them shuffle around. I
chose to go onto the locked, dingy units and keep patients company as they ate
their lunch. It was all about relationships to me. The room was filled with
groaning people and the constant leg movements of tardive dyskinesia. Most
patients knew me by my first name. “Susan, are you eating with us today?” they
would ask.
Then, in 1973, one of the psychiatrists at the center was shot and killed by a patient while I was in the next building. I heard the gunshot, but no one knew what had happened. As the information trickled down that someone had been shot, it wasn’t even clear if the gunman had been apprehended. The clinic continued with its routine activities, however, and we crawled on our knees around the building, avoiding windows. The terror I felt was incomparable to anything I had ever felt in my life. I never want to experience the feeling again.
After the shooting, I left my position and decided to go to medical school rather than pursuing psychiatry, given what I had witnessed. I got a job in somatic cell genetics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in order to increase my chances of getting into medical school. My task was to plant cells in different growth mediums. The rate of growth told a story about the cell DNA.
I wore gloves, a mask, and a plastic apron to maintain sterile conditions. To decrease the level of contaminants entering the lab, the air pumped into the rooms had a reverse airflow system. The suction made the doors to the lab difficult to open. I inadvertently contaminated multiple experiments with my long flowing hair.
One day, my boss beckoned me into his office. I anticipated getting fired. Instead, we talked about career options that were a better fit for my strengths. I enjoyed interacting with others[B1] , not the isolation of a lab setting. Once again, I found myself drawn to the mental health field. This time, I knew that if I made the choice to pursue this career path, it would mean facing unimaginable circumstances and interacting with unusual, and often frightening, individuals.
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