Rattled by a recent heartbreak, neuroscientist Prabarna Ganguly makes a mistake in the lab.
Prabarna Ganguly is one of the many Bostonian graduate students, studying neuroscience at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on how and why maternal care is necessary for the healthy development of infants. As an aspiring science writer, she is constantly looking for good science stories to share, and makes sure that her elevator pitches are always grandma-friendly. Comfortably Indian, she likes cricket, Pink Floyd, and enjoys simple frivolities. Also, having just dyed her hair red, she is quite excited about its possibilities.
This story originally aired February 9th, 2018 on an episode titled Heartbreak.
Story Transcript
In 2009, I came to the U.S. on a student visa and a suitcase full of expectations and pressure neatly packed in by my not-so-overbearing Indian parents. Following the normal Indian immigrant trajectory, I studied and got my bachelors in biology and then found myself studying early-life stress in rats. I’m not sure where that came from.
Everything was going pretty well when I fell in love. So we met on the first day of grad school. He said that he fell in love with me by the fourth day. We were friends for eight months and then we started this whirlwind romance. I can imagine all of you knowing this whole idea of, “Oh, he made me feel so good,” “He made me feel so amazing.”
And he would send me these postcards from faraway places saying things like, “Home is not where you're born. It is where you belong. Some people find it in places. Some people find it in people. I know this to be true; I found it in you.” And as kitschy and cliché this quote was, I’m sitting there bawling. I mean, come on, guys. This is rom-com stuff. When it happens to us it’s wonderful.
So things are just going really great, but there was one problem. You see, I was unhappy and I had been for a while. So at work, I was struggling to keep up. At home, in terms of talking to my parents, I was struggling to listen and take their advice. And at home per se I was struggling to balance my emotions. And being with somebody who is unbalanced isn’t really easy, as I’m sure many of you can imagine, because not only do you have to take care of yourself, you now have to take care of another person.
Inevitably, that relationship ended. I remember, as he was walking away after having packed his bags and having said things like, “Oh, I don't love you anymore. I don't wanna be with you anymore,” and all of that, I just couldn’t help thinking, “How could you say that to me? This is crazy.”
You see, I'd always been the one doing the breakup so somebody telling that that to me was the first time when I realized, well, I can be at fault here. And the relationship had been really important to me because outside this relationship bubble was another bubble that is much more unforgiving, which is the research bubble, where you have to stay on top and be on top or you're out.
So a couple of weeks pass and I had to do some research. I study neuroscience. I have to do some surgeries on the rats from time to time and study their brains. So I go to my lab and I take a rat and I give it an analgesic which is just to alleviate its pain after the surgery is done. I take it to the surgery room, I put it on the contraption that I’m going to use to open its brain and at that moment all I can think about is him. I mean, the whole mourning phase that happens with people after a breakup. “Oh, my God, the first time he kissed me. I’m never gonna be kissed like that again.” You know, the first time he said he loved me, the first time… and all of those innumerable personal histories that people share when they spend all their time together. I imagine this happening while there's “Amsterdam” by Coldplay playing in the background, which happened to be his favorite breakup song so, yeah, slightly ridiculous.
Anyway, I’m about to make my first incision into the rat and I notice that it’s not breathing. Okay. So I take it out of the contraption and I stroke its back a little bit. No response. I turn it over, do some chest compressions, no response. Then I go, “Okay, well, I guess I've got to give it CPR.”
So the way that you give rats CPR is you have a syringe with a needle and a plunger. You take out the plunger, you take out the needle, you put the bigger end of the syringe under the rat’s nose and you just go [makes puffing sound], so you just breathe air into its lungs. No response. Shit.
So I’m thinking, well, sometimes this happens and rats die before you do a surgery because, life, and you just don’t know what to do about it and so I go, “Okay, listen. I’m going on a trip with my friends tomorrow. I've got to finish these surgeries onwards and forwards here.” And after mourning for five seconds, because I used to name all of my rats at that point in time -- big mistake. Don’t do it -- I go on to the next animal.
So I get that bottle, the analgesic bottle, and I’m going to the animal room and I just take a glance and this time shit for real. It happened to be an identical bottle but it had a drug called ketamine in it, the same dose of which could potentially kill a rat. So this wasn’t life.
And I’m standing there with the murder weapon thinking, well, now I really need to tell my adviser about what happened here. So I’m thinking, “Confess? Not confess? Confess, I guess. I guess that’s fine.”
So I take the bottle, I take my future, and I go into my adviser’s office and I tell her what happened. She looks at me and she says, “I think you should go home for today.”
And I say, “Okay, I guess. What about the other surgeries?”
“Don’t worry about them. They'll be done by someone else.”
“Okay.”
So I go home and I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t think. I’m just walking around. I turn on the TV. There's Rocky playing, so I watch Rocky for a bit. Then I make some curry because curry is great for all of you and all of us, Indian food, comfort food (my ass).
So I am waiting for something and in the evening I get this email from her and my stomach just drops. It’s titled “Today and the Future.” Okay. Bring it on.
And I can’t read the email at this point. I’m just reading it so fast there's just phrases coming into my head, “deeply disappointed,” “could not be more clear,” “asked to leave.” And at that moment I’m just thinking, “Well, this is it. This is it. My life’s over. I’m going to be kicked out of the program. I’m going to have to go back to India.”
I think of my parents and those awful headlines such as every day a student commits suicide in India. All of these insane things are coming into my head at that moment. I don’t know what happened but I had this bizarre frantic response. I say, “You know what? I've got to send her something in this moment. I've just got to send her something. Let’s send her an experiment.”
So I just sit there and I think, “Let’s send her science because she doesn’t think I can be a good scientist. Okay.” So I just sit there and I just write some experimental design and I just send it to her. Then the next day I pack my bags and I go to Puerto Rico as I had planned with my friends. Classic for a story of dealing with your problems. You just pick a travel destination and you go there for two weeks. So that’s what I do because I obviously needed to clear that head space for a bit.
The second week in I get an email from her saying, “I’m looking forward to working with you when you come back.” Great!
Fast forward four months. Work is fine, my heart is healing one way or another, and I go into the lab and I’m about to enter the office when this undergrad comes running up to me saying, “Prabarna, Prabarna, something’s really wrong. You need to come with me right now.”
And I’m thinking, if an undergrad is saying something’s wrong then I guess something probably is really wrong right now. Okay. So I go with her and I enter this room where we keep our negative seventy-degree freezers. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this temperature, it’s really, really cold. We have to keep our brain samples here so that they don’t melt, basically. This is really important because all of our data is gotten through the brains that we keep.
I look at the freezer and I see water outside. There's condensation outside. Anyone with a fridge knows that’s not a good sign. So I open the freezer and everything has melted. Now, just to, again, reiterate, months of data. Years. Decades. Stuff that most likely is not going to be used anymore, still, really important science hiding somewhere in there, gone. Even the data that I had collected for the study that I had written before I left for Puerto Rico, gone. Mechanical failure, they say, or whatever. Some electrician hates us.
So I go back into the office and I’m just going, well, I don't know what to think. I don't know what to feel at that moment. And I hear footsteps. I know that it’s my adviser’s footsteps who has very distinct footsteps. Okay, well, preparing myself for the attack here.
So she comes in and she looks distressed. She's obviously really, really upset. She looks at me and almost teary-eyed she says, “Prabarna, I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say.”
At that moment, some random, crazy, absurd line comes into my head, and I think some of you probably know this line. “Life is not about how hard you hit. It is about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”
So with Rocky Balboa by my side, I just look at her and I say, “Well, let’s get to work,” and we did. Thank you.