When I picked up my injected mice, I tried to appear excited. To create this opportunity, for which I had pushed so hard, Dave had called in favors and was also sharing costs. Though these were modest, this was yet another factor demonstrating his commitment.
Now that I was the guinea-pig healer, my arm’s-length distance from the planning process worked in favor of protocol. I had never met the chair of the biology department, and I would be treating the mice in a small storeroom away from the lab, where I could come and go as I pleased. I would never see the control mice, which were now in the possession of the associate biologist.
Because Ben usually treated clients for thirty to sixty minutes once or twice a week, I decided I should treat my mice daily for a full hour. On day 1, I spent at least twenty minutes rearranging the items stored helter-skelter in the storeroom, rather like a prisoner personalizing his cell for the long haul. When I ran out of ways to procrastinate, I gingerly picked up the cage to examine my patients for the first time. Instead of six mice, there were only five, one having already died of natural causes. They were brown, not white, as my layman’s version of laboratory experiments had assumed. The transparent plastic cage was standard issue—about fourteen inches long by eight inches wide by five inches high, with a punctured metal top. At one end was a water bottle and a continuous feeder filled with smelly brown pellets.
Dave and I had agreed that I would not touch the mice. Instead, I would treat the cage containing them. In that way, all would be treated equally. Now with my hands on either side, I followed the routine I had practiced so many times with Ben, imagining an energy flowing down my left arm, out my hand, through the cage, and into the mice, then out the other side into my right hand and up my arm. I was aiming for “concentrated detachment”—not trying to heal, just allowing it to happen, carrying in my mind the desired intent for that outcome while not consciously concerning myself about how it might occur.
I waited expectantly to feel heat or a tingling in my left hand. Nothing. After about five minutes I found myself panicking, like an athlete whose muscles seize up on the day of the big race. I kept checking my watch—only one minute? It felt like ten. All confidence in myself and in the process evaporated. Belatedly I remembered to apply the mental-imaging technique Ben and I had designed. Though I’m not sure that adding this had any effect on the mice, it did wonders for me. At last I felt my left hand heat up, then the beginning of a current passing through me and, presumably, the mice. I stopped mental imaging and simply let the energy flow.
That first session established the pattern for those that followed. Usually my left hand would heat up for the duration. If it cooled after about twenty minutes, I still kept my palms against the cage for the entire hour. The more confident I felt, the more detached I became. My hands seemed to be working automatically while I observed.
Along with the desired detachment came intense boredom. Sometimes I would prop open a book or bring a radio, though I never lost my awareness of the mice. I could now empathize with what Ben must have gone through during his years of healing. At least with people there could be dialogue. Ironically, Ben probably would have preferred the mice.
On rare occasions, an indescribable feeling overcame me. I would be watching the mice or reading, when suddenly my whole body felt bathed in a warm glow. The detachment I felt from my hands, then my entire body, coalesced into a sense of oneness with the mice. All my doubts about the healings seemed trivial, and I was pervaded with peace and well-being. My mind emptied of thought. I simply was.
These sensations probably lasted about one to two minutes, leaving me relaxed and happy. I was never consciously able to create the experience. It happened or it didn’t—a gift of grace.
About a week into the treatment, I was changing the litter in the cage when I observed lumps on two of the mice. One had a growth near its left hind leg, while the other had one near its left front leg. Since Dave and I had anticipated that a successful treatment meant no cancer would occur, this was very depressing. And it got worse. Two more mice developed lumps, while those on the first two continued to grow bigger. When all five had tumors, I called Dave, ready to end the obviously failed experiment by putting the mice out of their misery. He urged me to continue until he had a chance to come to the storeroom and see for himself.
To say I now harbored doubts would be a gross understatement. By the time Dave arrived, all the mice were misshapen with tumors. One had a third of its leg consumed by a growth. I was devastated.
Before his visit, Dave had consulted with our biologist. He repeated to me what she told him: “This is a cancer that doesn’t spread. Instead, the mice get large external tumors that press against their internal organs, depriving them of nutrients and causing death through malnutrition.”
Now I felt worse. “These mice are obviously dying.”
Dave wasn’t convinced. “They’re acting quite normally.”
It was true. Even the mouse with the largest tumor continued to scuttle around the cage, occasionally fighting with the others. I had tried to calm them down, afraid they might injure one another—unconsciously, I suppose, I wanted sick mice to act like sick mice. I also noticed that when I picked up the cage to begin a treatment, the mice would gravitate to my left palm, even laying their tumors against it. When I turned the cage so my left palm was on the other side, the mice shifted too.
During the next few days, Dave pressured me into keeping the experiment going. Odd blackened spots like pencil points had appeared on some, then all, of the tumors. I became increasingly depressed on behalf of the mice. Before I could convince Dave to terminate, we heard that two of the control mice had died on schedule and that the rest were in such poor condition they were expected to follow shortly.
Dave became even more optimistic about continuing. As he argued, “Perhaps the treatments are slowing down the cancer even if they can’t prevent it. There’s no record of a single mouse living past day 27. Get one to live beyond twenty-eight days and we’ll have a world record. Experiments rarely turn out the way they’re supposed to. That’s why they’re called ‘experiments.’”
Great! So now we had lowered our sights from cancer prevention to a statistical study comparing longevity in two sets of pitifully dying mice. I asked one favor: “Since all the mice are going to die anyway, can I see the control mice?”
Dave arranged a visit through the biology chairman and the assistant. It was a somber sight. The four remaining mice were huddled together, eyes dull, skin shrunken, coats scruffy. Though their growths didn’t have the blackened spots I had noticed on my mice, they were so enormous that all the mice were having trouble breathing. As I turned away, I wondered how I had found myself trapped in such a dismal cul-de-sac. Obviously, I didn’t have the stomach for a career as an experimental biologist.
For a long time afterward, I couldn’t get those control mice out of my mind. I kept visualizing them, cringing in misery, wishing I could help. By comparison, my own mice no longer looked so bad. Their coats were healthy and they remained frisky despite their tumors. Perhaps I could get one or two of them to day 28, when we would terminate the experiment.
By days 17 to 21, some of the tumors with their blackened spots had ulcerated. Though I assumed this to be the beginning of the end, the behavior of my mice had not changed. They were still cavorting as if nothing was wrong. This continued even after the ulcerations grew large, raw, and red, as if holes had been burned into the mice. Every day I wondered how many would be dead. When I found them huddled motionless, I would gently tap the cage, counting as one head after another looked up. Just asleep—this time.
By day 28 all five were still alive. I informed them aloud that they were making history. Privately, I wondered if the biologists would dismiss this as a fluke, or even suspect fraud.
I noticed another change in three of my mice. The inside of their ulcerations had turned from red to white. Though I assumed this was infection, I found no pus or other discharge. Was it my imagination, or were their tumors also shallower? During the next week the same whitening happened with the other two mice. More startling, I was now convinced the tumors were shrinking. As I watched day by day, they completely disappeared, and the mice’s fur regrew. My patients now looked the same as when we had begun—little brown creatures of normal shape and size.
Dave and I were too stunned to jump to conclusions. Instead, he took the mice to the biologist for an expert opinion. We spent the evening together awaiting her report, pacing like expectant fathers, reprising the emotions we had experienced during the previous weeks—anxiety, disbelief, fear, foolishness, impatience, wonder, dread, frustration.
When the phone finally rang, I had to sit through a full repertoire of “yesses,” “uh-huhs,” and “oh I sees” while waiting for Dave to finish. After he hung up, he walked right past me, mumbling something I couldn’t understand and looking ill.
I ran after him. “What’s wrong?”
He ignored me while compulsively rubbing his hands and letting loose a string of expletives.
At last I got it out of him—“The mice are cancer free. They’re cured!”
I ran around the apartment as aimlessly as a mouse on a wheel. I didn’t know what else to do. Sure, I had witnessed many gratifying clinical healings, but curing mice in a laboratory was metaphorically like finding the smoking gun.