SUFFER THE LITTLE BEAGLES | Susan Murphy
I sat in a hard plastic chair, back against the cinder block wall, when I first saw them. Or did I smell them first? I was alone in a cavernous room in the basement of a cancer hospital and research center. To my right was a double door from the service parking lot. A man struggled to push an industrial cart through them. Thunk went the first wheel over the metal lip followed by a metallic rattle, thunk-rattle again as it rolled over the second lip before coming to rest in front of me. The man left to close his truck. Resting on that flat-bottomed cart were kennels stacked two high and three across. Each cage housed a beagle. Not bounding, barking beagles but beagles who looked at me with torpid eyes, without lifting their heads. Their smell was new to me. Chemical? Rotten garbage? Dying flesh? Every sentient being in that space endured their suffering in silence. I was relieved when the man came back and they all disappeared into a freight elevator.
My vigil continued. To the left of me was a closed door that led to another cinder block room where I had left my husband who lay on a stretcher. The whole room was painted in a life-size jungle scene with monkeys swinging between trees and toucans perched on tree limbs. The empty crib in the corner suggested the art was meant to distract babies and toddlers when they received total body irradiation.
The door opened and I went to my husband’s side. “It was so weird. It was like a cool wind was blowing through my body.”
We walked to the patient’s elevator and ascended five floors to the adult cancer ward. After entering his room, we took turns washing our hands over the sink with soapy water while The Star-Spangled Banner played twice in our heads. He finished first and plopped on the bed with his sandals. I tenderly removed them, trying not to bump his feet made sore by the chemotherapy. I pulled the covers to his neck and rubbed his back before sitting in the chair close to the bed. His torpid eyes met mine as I took his hand while we waited for his treatment to kill his cancerous bone marrow.
The hospital routine continued until days later a knock sounded at the door followed by a nurse’s head popping through the crack. “The new bone marrow is here!” She entered the room followed by a woman holding a small red and white igloo cooler. Hours earlier she had been at the donor’s operating suite. Once his bone marrow had been harvested, she placed it in the igloo, boarded a plane, and flew to us with no break in custody. After they washed their hands, the courier placed the igloo on the bedside table and opened the lid. All four of us peered inside. I exhaled breath I didn’t know I was holding; my husband received lethal doses of chemotherapy and radiation before the donor’s bone marrow was harvested.
Both bags were lifted out of the igloo and passed around for inspection. They could have been mistaken for pints of whole red blood. “You are lucky. You have plenty here. Some doctors do not harvest enough,” the nurse said.
My husband and I cooed over the bags like we did over our daughter when she was born. These bags represented possibilities—that our daughter would grow up knowing her father, of him walking her down the aisle someday.
After a week his lab results showed his white blood cell count had dropped enough. A nurse hung a bag of bone marrow on the IV pole, attached it to one of the many IV lines running into his chest, and opened the line. Drip by drip it made its way to the clear liquid dyeing it red. The doctors told us the donor’s bone marrow would find its way into the center of his empty bones and grow there, eventually producing healthy blood components.
I nurtured my husband for two years as he journeyed from the edge of death to health. Who comforted the beagles from the edge of death until their usefulness to the study ended and they were euthanized? I wanted to raise an army of compassionate volunteers to comfort them along the way: hold them when drugs were administered, stroke their velvety ears during the worst of it.
It is decades later. Our daughter grew to adulthood knowing her father. The medical team called him one of their miracle patients because he had a fifty percent chance of surviving.
My family, and hopefully the children who had lain in that crib and their families, benefited from the beagle experiments. But still, I can’t erase the memory of their smell, their inertia, their drowsy eyes, their silence.
Susan Schuerman Murphy is an attorney who defended healthcare providers when they were sued in Texas. The author has published medical jurisprudence articles and a book. Now she prefers to write creatively. The author lives near Ann Arbor, MI.