12:03PM. 

Chloe taps on the cracked screen of her hand-me-down iPhone and reads aloud the time confidently and receives a frustrated exhale from her supervisor that tells me they are behind schedule. I find it unsurprising to know that they are quite literally running on numbers and timings that signify something only they understand, given that the room we find ourselves in is quite simply, the embodiment of an organised chaos. Surging piles of unfinished research drafts, used apparatus, and dense network of wires that adorn the peeling ceiling of the pulmonary biomedical research lab. Yet, they pale in comparison to the exploding workspace of one of my closest friends, whose surface is no longer visible under the makeshift pet cemetery it boasts.

“Ugh! The smell of blood literally won’t leave my hands,” exclaims Chloe. “Or maybe I’m just imagining it at this point.” My insides may be turning upon noticing the... well, insides, of the dead mouse that is mere feet away from me, but this is just an ordinary day for Chloe. In a few swift, purposeful movements, she wraps the now blood-stained paper towel around the body, adding it to the Ziploc collection beside her that houses at least seven other bodies. Donning a new pair of gloves, she is ready for her next task. 

Under the mechanical buzz of machines whose names I couldn’t pretend to know, I hear her mutter the faintest of curses under her breath as she grasps onto the nearest tweezer. Knitted brows and almost entirely steady hands, she seamlessly snips the aorta of subject 4 in half and gingerly places a slice of its lung into a test tube. Aware of my unsteady gaze on the mouse, she looks away from her work to glance at me fleetingly before looking back down. “They don’t feel anything, I promise. They’re totally sedated - bitches are like me at 8AM.” 

12:16PM. 

Chloe begins to repeat procedure from the start, breaking me out of my initial shock and allowing me to gradually understand the purpose of the experiment which was rather disheartening to witness. She leads me over to the backroom, which looks something larger than a storage closet and comprises neatly lined shelves of chemical beakers. In the very centre lies the rectangular cage covered with grain, where the wide-eyed mice seem to know what’s coming. Unhesitatingly pulling open the upper shaft of the cage, Chloe places one hand on the base of a weary mouse’s tail and begins to lift it, only for her to drop it immediately. 

“Fuck!” She exclaims. “I just got bitten yesterday, I am not doing that shit again.” Having narrowly avoided the mouse’s defensive nip, she exhales deeply and makes a successful second attempt, deftly carrying the mouse upside down and onto her workspace. Her boss Laura holds down the clambering creature while Chloe rapidly injects its side with a blend of ketamine and xylazine, a drug combination that renders them alive but entirely unconscious and lacking sensation. She explains that two days prior, they inserted a syringe full of COVID-19 spike proteins - the proteins in the outer layer of the virus which cause lung injury without it spreading like a virus - into the trachea of these mice. Some mice were injected with the COVID proteins while others weren’t, and were given two days for the effects to take place on a cellular level. After this, variables like their lung compliance would be measured to understand how COVID impacted their pulmonary functioning. “You’re so lucky!” Chloe’s loud voice is bursting with its usual energy and radiance, dripping with its occasional moments of heavy sarcasm. “That means you’re here for sacrifice day!” 

12:23PM. 

Pinching the bottom foot of the nearly sedated mouse, Chloe lets out a frustrated groan at its reflexive twitch, because this tells her she cannot yet begin procedure. While her and her boss sit facing each other on opposite ends of the central lengthy table, Chloe urges a hesitant Laura to take a vacation. 

“There’s no point going on vacation. I really want to see Japan but I can’t get out of work... maybe if I can get rid of that shift no one wants to take from me.”

Chloe, always unapologetically herself, looks up at her boss with disbelief for a moment, before returning her laser focus to the physics homework she was doing while waiting on the mouse to fall asleep. 

“What the hell are you talking about? You have to go, we’ll make it work. What’s the point of all this if you can’t even catch a break?” 

Laura, who moments ago was barely considering the idea, nods her head slightly and lets out a small laugh. “Speaking of,” she says, as if breaks were something commonly forgotten here, “I’m going to take a quick break and grab food. Would either of you like anything?” Chloe and I politely decline. “Are you sure, Chloe? It’s been a long day for you.” 

Flashing a classic Chloe smile, she claims she has to “go town on” her muffin, resulting in a chuckle from both Laura and I. When her boss leaves the room, I narrow my eyes at Chloe, asking her if she ate anything since last night. 

She knows better than to lie to someone who can see right through her. “I was going to,” she says hurriedly, “Seriously. Every time we do a sac I try to remember to make overnight oats but I keep forgetting.” 

I’m moments away from hounding her for her eating habits when the head of the department Omar and another student researcher Xeta walk in. Omar’s calculating eyes quickly scan the room, clearly a repeated effort of checking everything is under control. Eyes landing on me, I feel intimidated for a moment before his lips morph into a kind smile and introductions are made. 

He asks Chloe how progress was looking. “Great! The vent broke, the mice won’t fall asleep, and the procedure has been unsuccessful like 45 times.” Smiling at her typical sarcasm, Xeta jumps in. “I bet she’s exaggerating. As always.”

Placing a hand on her chest and gasping loudly, Chloe feigns mock hurt at Xeta’s (truthful) claim. “You’re right. It was only 43 times.” As usual, even in the most morbid settings, she has the effortless ability to make every person in the room laugh. 

Every minute or two, Chloe pinches the mouse’s foot to check whether it’s asleep. Still twitching, now ever so slightly, she knows she is closer to being able to continue. Her eyes scan the room in a practiced manner that mirrors Omar’s and falls on Xeta, who looks rather fatigued. She quickly asks her if everything is okay, only to realize that her friend arrived to lab straight from a blood test and was feeling “a little woozy.” 

Chloe, in steps so quick but resolute, seems to almost glide through the room. In moments, she is by her friend’s side with the muffin from her bag, which Xeta is uncertain to accept. “Are you sure? What will you eat?” 

“I literally just ate. I had an extra so you’d actually be helping me by taking it off my hands.” 

From the corner of her eyes, she gives me the briefest of glances. Her tone is so convincing that even I might have believed her. 

12:29PM.

Even at 5”1, Chloe stands taller than most. 

Grabbing a chair to reach a box of test tubes atop a shelf,  she returns to her work table and adjusts the transparent glasses that sit on her face. She closes another button on her paper white lab coat that makes her caramel skin stand out to prevent her favorite purple tank top from being stained. Although she wears black parachute pants today, she usually prefers to wear sweatpants given that she volunteers 40 hours of her week to the lab. Or she did, at least, until a coworker told her informed her that she “shouldn’t dress that way” as a woman in the workplace, informing her that no one would take her seriously. Placing her braids, which I know she makes to prevent her curly hair from “blowing up,” out of harm’s way, she is nearly ready to begin procedure. 

While Omar left the room, Chloe and Xeta sit next to each other, with Laura sitting across them. Laura reminds them to extract the right lobe of their lungs along with their livers so they can later test lung functioning. Every few minutes, she looks up from her own work to check if her students are on the right track, providing helpful tips as they extract tissues from the mice, but appearing consistently confident in her student’s abilities. While they listen attentively to her instructions, Chloe subconsciously caresses the mouse cupped in her hands.

Laura seems to be handling a million tasks at once, from running tests in the backroom centrifuge to observing specimens under her electron microscope. From Chloe’s right, Xeta looks to her with an eyebrow raised. “Do you remember if I already injected this mouse?”

Chloe holds her unconscious mouse in both of her hands, gently positioning it with its back on the table and stomach facing upward. While diligently injecting it with Heparin, which she later tells me is to ensure the blood can be extracted smoothly without it clotting, she confidently tells Xeta that she did. 

If I wasn’t right next to Chloe, I wouldn’t have heard her soft, comforting murmurs. “Hey buddy,” she whispers gently, “I’m so sorry but it’s time to say bye bye.”

With her trusty precision microscissors, she first pulls the flesh out of the mouse’s body, putting aside tufts of its fur. Her bright table lamp spotlights the entirety of its insides, showcasing its fleshy bead-sized organs. She draws blood from its lifeless corpse, placing it in a test tube that she adds to an ice bucket to ensure it is met with ideal physiochemical conditions, which will later help in detecting diseased tissues.

Every now and then, one of the three women will ask for a syringe, suture, or needle to be passed, and the said object will find its way to them without a flicker of doubt, their hands moving subconsciously without their eyes even straying from the task at hand. The three of them are in perfect control of their surroundings, with unwavering focus and complementing each other seamlessly. 

While carefully removing the mouse’s pulmonary lobe and placing it in a test tube, Chloe simultaneously tells Xeta and I about a recent disastrous first date, on which “a micropenis man” promised to take her to an “underground coffee shop,” which happened to be none other than Peets Coffee. 

Amidst our bubbling laughter, Chloe’s focus never strays. “He’s dead to me now,” she says animatedly as she extracts the heart from the mouse’s body. 

12:41PM.

Removing the test tubes from the ice incubator, she utilizes a dropper to pinch a few droplets of blood onto a small glass disk. She pushes the plate directly under her heavy-duty electron microscope, and begins studying them with unparalleled focus. 

Because these aren’t just any mice. Chloe’s lab isn’t just modelling the effects of COVID on lung capacity, but is more focused on testing the effects of COVID on the lungs of those suffering with sleep apnea and intermittent hypoxia. Thus far, their findings strongly suggest that mortality rates are significantly higher for those with sleep apnea. 

Chloe isn’t just any scientist. She was diagnosed with sleep apnea and narcolepsy at a mere three years of age. Frequent hospital visits have become the norm for her, but this is precisely what fuels her to do exactly what she does. She is determined to find solutions to improve lifestyles of patients suffering with sleep apnea.  

She dedicatedly notes the number of dead red blood cells and pulmonary cells to measure lung injury. She tells me that most of the pulmonary cells in the mouse with sleep apnea and COVID were dead in contrast to the one with only COVID which had far more surviving cells, which supports their award-winning finding that mortality and risk factor for the former patients is far higher. 

Amidst the grotesque sights that come with the three of them having to conduct these daily experiments, Chloe ceaselessly makes others smile. “My roommate literally forced me out of bed on Halloween. I only had one purple dress so I guess I was a grape.” 

While the room breaks out in laughter again, I wonder if her coworkers know the reason Chloe only has one dress. I wonder if they see that behind that unfleeting smile is the daughter of low-income Persian immigrants trying to uphold her family. The girl that can make every person in a room light up with laughter while she holds back her own pain. 

12:50PM.

Chloe takes her “break” at the end of her shift, which she spends diligently labelling test tubes, safely disposing sharps, and sanitizing her workspace. Chloe may be the loudest in the room, but as she restocks equipment and rapidly amends the surging messes in the lab space, I realize that she is the modest, consistent silent force making sure everything around her runs like clockwork. She does what she has to without having to be asked, because that is who she is. Whether its for her research coworkers, for anyone who has the privilege of meeting her, or for the people she’s paving the way for, Chloe always leaves a better space for those who come behind her. 

We greet her team goodbye and walk out of the building together.