Chapter 16: Foam Heart

Yoshi picked up the white foam heart and gave it a squeeze. Clutching it in his hand he crossed the corridor and stuck his head through the door of the office opposite. Spying Marshall sitting there with a furrowed brow and the frayed end of a pencil bouncing between his teeth, Yoshi gauged the weight of the heart and sidearmed it at his target. It flashed past Marshall’s back and thudded into the filing cabinet behind. He turned around confused, but not surprised. He raised an eyebrow at his attacker and removed the buds from his ears. He tapped the spacebar.

            “What’s going on?”

            “Got surgery. You said you wanted to sit in?” Yoshi moved towards him and bent to pick up his heart but Marshall blocked him with his chair, spinning around to stamp his foot down on the ball.

            “You going now?”

            Yoshi stood back up. “I’ve got everything ready, yeah.”

            “Can you give a second? I wanna get this sentence right.” Marshall extended his hand and picked up the heart and showed it to Yoshi. “Thanks.” He put it behind his monitor. Yoshi backed slowly out of the room keeping his eyes trained on his friend all the way. Marshall put the buds back in and turned back to the screen. He unpaused his music and tilted his forehead at the text before of him, bathed in the vacuum of noise.

KLF4 binds Cyclin D2. G1/S arrest. KLF4 up at 18h; PC3 and MPP. cc w/draw imp for C.

            He played around with his notes, expanding, contracting, typing, deleting, cutting, inserting, until he was happy with the progression and cadence of the sentence. Finally, after 5 minutes of piercing thought he re-read what he had written.

As the transcription factor KLF4 directly binds the Cyclin D2 promoter to suppress cell cycle progression at the G1/S boundary (Klaewsongkram et al. 2007), increased KLF4 protein within 18 hours of the addition of Phenrododiol to both murine prostate cancer primary cultures and the PC-3 cell line indicates the imperative for cell cycle withdrawal in prostatic tumorigeneisis (Figure 5.4B and C).

Marshall leaned back and wrapped his hands around the back of his head. He saved the document, locked his computer and went to look for Yoshi. He found him loitering over Leigh’s shoulder reading the latest edition of the West.

“Hey Leigh. You ready Yoshi?”

“Hey Mar.” She waved, but didn’t look up from her paper.

“Yeah.” Yoshi stretched up to his full height, such as it was, and stretched, yawned. “Let’s get going.” He picked up his sterilised toolkit from his desk, while Marshall grabbed the rope of the esky and followed close behind.

Yoshi swiped his card against the sensor and opened the door into the gowning room. They pulled blue plastic booties on over the top of their shoes and slipped their arms into scrubs, tying them blind behind their backs. They proceeded through the ante-side of the airlock and into the animal facility to render themselves anonymous behind duck-billed facemasks and surgical gloves.

Marshall started up the bio-cabinet and doused the cold steel with jets of ethanol, wiping the surface dry with a paper towel. Yoshi inspected the cardboard tags on the front of the Perspex boxes, pulled one down from the stack and placed it in the bio-cabinet. He removed the lid and snatched at the tail of an unsuspecting mouse. Lifting it from the cage and onto his sleeve he checked it for signs of injury or weakness, letting it move around on his arm with its tail held between his fingers, gentle yet firm. Judging it to be healthy he set it back into its cage, picked up a littermate by its tail and repeated the process for each mouse. He moved with all the skill afforded by years of practice. Content he placed the cage in a carry box and selected another from the stack. He inspected the animals in kind and added the second cage to the box. Marshall watched intently from the side.

Yoshi placed the box onto a trolley and cleaned up after himself with ethanol, keeping it all as sterile as possible for the next person. Yoshi removed the aluminium mouse barrier from its slots in front of the door, pushed the trolley through and replaced the gate.

They took the mice to the lab and Yoshi set up his implements- forceps, scissors, scalpel, pins, board, scales, saline, paper towels, ethanol- before grabbing the tail of the nearest mouse. He clucked softly at the mouse as he let it relax on his sleeve; it nestled into the crook of his arm. When Yoshi prized it away from the fabric of his sleeve it flattened itself out and flew like superman. When it was lowered onto a metal grill it instinctively gripped tight to the wire and pulled against the force fixing its tail. The ball of Yoshi’s thumb came down onto the back of its neck before it even had time to contemplate its situation. Yoshi pulled the tail straight backwards and rolled his thumb over the neck until his palm faced away. Vertebrae dislocating cracked dully. It all happened so fast. Yoshi, expressionless, pinched the neck to make sure it was properly broken. Both men turned away so as not to watch the convulsive death rattle.

Once it stopped kicking, Yoshi weighed the mouse, announced the readout for Marshall to record in the red notebook, and sprayed its torso with ethanol. He cut off the tail with scissors, then through the skin halfway up its back and tore the skin from the lower half of the body before pinning the animal to the board. He peeled away the fat pads and connective tissue of the abdomen and delicately removed the prostate. After rinsing with saline and weighing it Yoshi cut it in two, placing one piece in a plastic tube and dropping it into the dewar of liquid nitrogen, and mounting the other in a mould of Vectashield and freezing it over a boat of isopentane sailing on a sea of nitrogen.

The ritual was repeated for each animal. For the last two Yoshi offered Marshall the opportunity to gain some experience.

“Guess I’d better learn sometime- pad the CV and all that.”

They switched places- Marshall onto the stool and Yoshi looking on from the side. Marshall replicated Yoshi’s movements as best he could. He felt the crack of the neck, pinched the scruff and felt for the separation of the vertebrae. Feeling no bumps he released the tail. The body twitched a few times, legs kicking frantically at the air, before settling motionless atop the wire mesh.

“That really gives me the creeps, how it keeps kicking.”

“Yeah. I still find it disconcerting. It’s even worse when you manage to unnerve yourself.”

“What. You psyche yourself out?”

“Oh from time to time. Everyone loses their nerve sometimes. It can be weeks before you can do it again. You can’t plan for it. It just happens. I’ve had to get one of the tech’s to step in for me before.”

“Shit. I guess it goes to show that Chinks have feelings too.”

“Still, it’s the best way. The quicker, the better. The mouse doesn’t have time to get unnecessarily stressed. The faster and less handling the better. Sod my feelings.”

“I guess so…”

Marshall adjusted the eyepieces and the torches on the dissecting microscope. Yoshi sat by and instructed him through the surgery and extraction.

“So how are things going with Hazel?”

“Yeah, pretty good.”

“Just pretty good?”

Marshall smiled.

“Your head’s been in the fucking clouds these past few weeks.”

“Has it?”

“Yep. She’s got quite a hold on you, hasn’t she?”

“I guess so. She is pretty great.”

“I’ll say. If you fuck it up I will personally smash you. She’s smokin’.”

Marshall laughed. “I’ll bear that in mind, then.”

“Make sure you do.”

Marshall maneuvered the forceps to expose the posterior of the prostate. Both he and Yoshi held their breath as he lowered the scissors. The sharpened tips trembled lightly. Tentatively he snipped first the vas deferens, ureters and urethra before removing the prostate itself, slicing it in two with a scalpel.

“I’ve got a couple of old breeders that should probably be culled. Do you want to start up an old-age primary?”

“Mmm. I guess I should. Do you have any spare digest medium?”

“In the coolroom. In the yellow rack I think. It’s a couple of weeks old, though,” said Yoshi.

“Meh. It’ll be fine.” Marshall waved a dismissive hand at him. “If you want to go get them I’ll stay and get everything set up.”

“Sure.”

“Have fun.”

“You too.”