My Experiences with Unions and Monkeys: Part 2

After a few years at my job in the union shop, I took a new job in a different facility.  It was a bizarro version of my previous job.  The facility was at most 10 years old.  It was not unionized.  Everyone hated the Yankees.  They also hated the parent company--the site was an independent company and was acquired about a year before I joined.  This was stupid, in my view, because all the senior people became highly placed in the parent organization and made so much money in the buyout that they all could afford to buy a house on Nantucket and their own plane to fly there (seriously, I know at least one person who did that) and they took care of their people to the detriment of the rest of the organization.  Everyone at every level in the company did well in the buyout.  While the Environmental Health and Safety guys at my previous job drove F-150s, all the EH&S guys at the new place had F-250s and some even had a dually.

But a lot was the same because Metro Boston is a lot like New Jersey.  North Shore/South Shore debates are much like Taylor ham/pork roll.  The majority of people spend their entire lives in a bubble with a 25 mile radius, including college.  New Hampshire is Rockland County.  The accents are not sexy.  No one cares about college sports but many people are overly passionate about their favorite pro sports teams and decorate everything with the teams' logos, including their faces.  

The new facility was similar to the old one in that it was in the middle of nowhere and somewhat self-contained so going out to lunch was almost impossible, trapping you there all day and forcing you to eat the same crappy food all the time.  The EH&S guys were similar too.  There was one EH&S guy in his early 50's with a bushy handlebar mustache, engineer boots, tattoos, a chain tethering his wallet to his belt, and a leather vest (a "cut") bearing various insignias from his NH-based motorcycle crew.  He swaggered around like a badass but he was 5'4" so it was a little silly.  One day he shaved his mustache.  A few hours later I saw him again and he had the mustache again!  I asked my boss if I was losing my mind and he laughed and said "No, dumbass, Peter shaved his mustache but Paul didn't."  Turns out there were two of this guy--they were twins.  So just like my old job, the EH&S guys literally came in twos.

The new site also similarly had manufacturing, quality control, research, development, and a big animal facility.  My new job involved developing new formulations and part of that involved testing the formulations in animals so I spent a significant amount of time in the animal facility.

It was some of the worst time of my life.  One of my primary tasks was gamma scinitgraphy.  We labeled the proteins we studied with iodine-125, or "I-125," a radioactive element, so that we could measure how long the proteins remained where we put them in the animals' bodies.  Everyone referred to the radioactive material as "hot."  As in, "we got more hot protein" or "we're out of hot" or "be careful with that syringe it's full of hot" or "watch out for that spill it's hot."  We made the measurements using a gamma camera, a massive device driven by a Unix computer.  I would design the formulations, mix in the hot proteins, and a veterinarian or a veterinary technician would implant the formulation in the animals.  Then, while the animals were sedated, I would make measurements using the gamma camera over time.  

This was bad for many reasons.  Iodine naturally binds to your thyroid--it's often added to salt to prevent people from getting goiters so that's typically a good thing.  It's a terrible thing, however, if the iodine is radioactive like I-125.  I-125 also has a long half-life, which means that it sticks around forever.  So working with the radio-labeled proteins was serious stuff and I had to wear lead gloves to handle it, and spilling any on myself would've been a nightmare because they I would've had radioactive iodine stuck in my thyroid for 25 years.  I had to be vigilant about this all the time.  

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To enter the animal facility you had to don a bunch of proper protective equipment or "PPE".  There was minimum amount of required PPE, much like flair.  It varied depending on who was running the animal facility, and that person varied with surprising frequency.  The guy in charge when I first got there was fired when they discovered he was sneaking into the ketamine, an animal tranquilizer that you might know as Special K.  It was that type of place.  Anyway, the PPE offered in the airlock to the animal facility was a hairnet, face mask, surgical gloves, booties, and Tyvek lab coats.  This was all disposable and thus great for the environment.  Because I worked with radioactive material I had to wear all that PPE.  When I hear people complain about wearing a mask I laugh--I used to have to wear one all day plus a whole bunch of other more uncomfortable stuff.

And I did this in a tiny room with a massive machine that generated lots of heat.  As some of you know I am a ridiculously sweaty guy so all that PPE coupled with the heat from the gamma camera had me soaked with sweat after 20 minutes.  I was in that room for hours.  Also in that room was a machine that sterilized equipment using ethylene oxide, a really nasty chemical that can kill you several ways.  It was a relatively small device but disturbing given its deadly nature.  It sat in the corner of the room, silently threatening to kill me.  I think they stuck it in the gamma camera room because we had the space for it and everyone figured the gamma camera guys were screwed anyway, what's a little ethylene oxide exposure when we already had thyroid damage.

Prior to this role I had never spent any time with rats or rabbits, and through it I learned that I am severely allergic to rats and rabbits.  Rats are actually pretty friendly creatures but they do have fingernails and if one of them scratched my skin the least bit the scratches would turn into welts.  Their dander made my eyes itch and water, my nose congest, my throat constrict, and my lungs cough.  They can also be mean so you had to watch out for the occasional biter.  Rats are typically used for early studies because they are small and cheap and thus a good model for a large sample size.  As a result, I typically spent 3-4 days a week in a room full of radioactive rats, carefully guarding my thyroid from radiation and the rest of my body from rat dander.  Once dosed with I-125 the rats were "hot rats" but remarkably no one I worked heard of Frank Zappa.

For anything larger than a rat I would have vet tech support so they handled the rabbits.  I think I'm more allergic to rabbits than rats, at least as far as my respiratory system goes.  I'm convinced that my chronic cough is due at least in part to four years of exposure to all these animals.

My days in the animal facility involved retrieving the rats, wheeling them into the gamma camera room, pulling them out of their boxes one at a time and dropping them into a large bell jar hooked up to this octopus of an anesthesia machine that pumped a mix of oxygen and an anesthetic gas (I can't remember the name).  Once the rats were knocked out I would put three on the gamma camera's imager and stick their noses into these little nose cones at the end of one of the octopus's tentacles.  This kept them asleep while I imaged them for 3 minutes.  Essentially I photocopied radioactive rats.  Then I would put them back in their box and turn to the next set of rats.  This could take hours depending on the size of the study.

At the end of the study I would "sacrifice" the rats, which means I killed them by dropping them into a box hooked up to a tank full of carbon dioxide.  Then I would empty the rats' boxes (full of bedding and radioactive rat excreta--after the animals' bodies metabolized the protein, the I-125 would be freed and excreted through the urine and feces, I had to deal with literal hot shit) and carcasses into a plastic bag which then went into a special radioactive storage freezer.  Every once in a while we did a study without radioactivity, and in those cases I had to dissect the dead rats to retrieve whatever I implanted in them for histological analysis.  You have not smelled nastiness until you've smelled the insides of a dead rat.

The gamma camera was a cantankerous device and its Unix operating system was indecipherable.  There was only one IT guy who knew Unix, Steve the Eunuch (because he knew Unix, not because he didn't have a penis, at least as far as I know), so if the Eunuch was on vacation and the gamma camera acted up I was screwed.  My group leader was completely humorless and very tightly wound so when I once told her "I can't get the data out today, the gamma camera is frozen and the Eunuch from IT is out" she thought I was disparaging Steve and gave me a stern talking-to.  The gamma camera computer wasn't compatible with our network so I had to manually transcribe all the data into my lab notebook and then enter it manually into an Excel spreadsheet back at my desk.  I never made any errors, nothing to worry about there. 

My fellow employees often added to the degree of difficulty.  Many were, perhaps rightfully, terrified of I-125.  Rats are natural escape artists and although their cages are designed against this there was the occasional jailbreak.  No one was happy with me when one of my hot rats got loose, leaving a trail of hot shit and hot piss behind it.  It was discovered by the guy with the Special K habit and he kept it in a box on his desk until I told him how I-125 works and the bit about the pee and poop and that he thus might not want to keep it near his morning coffee and danish.  Then he handed it to me and told me to put it back where it belonged.

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Some people were of the view that they shouldn't have to work near radioactive material and they were always looking out for people in my group to slip up and get some where it didn't belong.  This happened once, I don't recall how, but as a result they reported us for allegedly being sloppy and two EH&S guys (not the twins) rode shotgun with me in the gamma camera room for a day to see what we do and to recommend better practices.  They had to suit up in all the PPE and sweat it out in the hot (puns!) room with all the boxes full of rats and their excreta.  About an hour into the day, one of the occasional angry rats bit my finger pretty badly.  It went through both gloves (I wore two gloves on each hand just in case I got a rip) and there was a lot of blood.  My allergies kicked in almost immediately and my index finger swelled up like a salami.  The EH&S guys were excited.  They sprung into action to administer first aid, whisking me over to a sink to wash the wound.  I told them to "Get the fug offa me!" but they insisted on treating my injury.  I joked that Spider-Man got his powers from a radioactive spider bite so maybe I'll turn into Rat-Man with my radioactive rat bite.  They didn't see the humor but they had sympathy for my plight, and they were delighted that they got to use their walkie-talkies to radio my injury to the nurse's station.

This all sounds pretty miserable, right?  It pales in comparison to working with monkeys.  They are terrifying.  We used cynologous monkeys, which are also called crab-eating macaques or "cynos."  If given the opportunity they will rip your face off because they are exceedingly angry.

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Our cynos came from the wild.  Someone out there might breed them but our supplier got them from the original source.  Imagine you're a monkey out in the jungle, handling your monkey business.  You might have a girlfriend or two, maybe you have a family.  Maybe you're a young guy and you still live with your parents but you like to sow your wild oats.  Life is good.  One day you're over by the swamp, trying to catch some crabs for lunch when BLAM, you get hit in the ass with a tranquilizer dart.  You're instantly woozy, then some human throws a net over you and drags you over to a box, throws you in and you can't see anything.  You pass out.  When you wake up you're in a cage by yourself, but surrounded by many other cages with a cyno in each.  You're all put on a boat and shipped to Massachusetts.  All you have to eat is whatever monkey chow they give you and some fresh fruit.  You live in a cage for the rest of your life, away from your ladyfriend and your homeboys and your family.  You're poked and prodded and used in all sorts of experiments.  You would be angry.  Angry enough to rip the fingers off the hand that feeds you.

Cynos are expensive.  In order to get into the animal facility I had to take a tuberculosis test every six months, the Mantoux skin test.  The on-site nurse would inject a little nut of tuberculin between the layers of skin in my forearm and I would come back two days later.  If the nut disappeared I was fine.  If it was raised and inflamed I had TB, which meant they were very concerned for the monkeys and I would've gotten in trouble for exposing them to TB.

Cynos are pretty smart.  When you walk into the cyno room they all angle the metal plate on the front of their cages so they can see you in the reflection, like prisoners in jail.  Some of them are friendly enough that you can house two in a box, in which case they get a big cage.  Some of them are not friendly and will kill whatever cyno you put in there with them.

As in any prison there has to be an alpha.  Our alpha was Number 3.  He was exceedingly large, twice as big as any other cyno we had, and he had a ruff of head on his hair like a mohawk.  He had huge teeth and he rippled with muscles.  He lived alone because he would destroy his roommate.  All of the cages had a lever on the side that you could pull to make the back wall move forward, trapping the monkey against the wall so you could give it a shot to tranquilize it.  Number 3 was such a badass that when he saw you coming he would turn and put his butt up against the bars so you could knock him out.

We always had to wear safety glasses but when we were near cynos we also wore face shields because they can carry the herpes B virus.  You can get it from their saliva so you need to protect your eyes, nose and mouth.  It has an 80% fatality rate, so a halfway sedated cyno can kill you even if he's too loopy to rip your face off, all he needs to do is spit in your face.  

So when we had monkey studies, I was stuck for hours in a sweltering room, draped in layers of PPE, surrounded by thyroid-seeking radioactive material and a carcinogenic sterilizing machine, with an unconscious primate that might wake up and give me a deadly disease or bite my jugular.  

And that wasn't the worst of it!  After a day like that I had to go home to a woman who was a cross between the worst of Betty Draper (heartless high-maintenance ice queen from a fancy zip code who has a bad relationship with food) and Sammi Sweetheart (demanding mercurial Italian princess from the Tri-State area who has no sense of humor about herself).  

from January Jones GIFs via Gfycat

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I should've known better--she hated The Princes Bride.

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So if you ever wondered "What the hell was zman up to around the turn of the 21st century," you now have your answer.  And that's my story about working with monkeys.