After cave geologist Gabriela Serrato Marks develops fibromyalgia, exploring caves becomes a challenge.

Gabriela Serrato Marks is a PhD student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography, where she works with stalagmites from Mexico. She fell in love with rocks and the ocean while getting her B.A. in Earth and Oceanographic Science from Bowdoin College. Her current research focuses on archives of past rainfall and climate change. Outside of research, she is interested in issues of diversity and inclusion in STEM, hanging out with her cat, and growing tiny squash in her parents’ garden. 

This story originally aired on Jan. 19, 2018, in an episode titled “Bad Days in the Field”.

Story Transcript

I spent my first day as a graduate student in a cave underground in Southern Mexico looking for rocks.  I was with a big group of geologists so I was having a great time.  The cave is just like you’re picturing, probably.  It was muddy and there were bats.  It was cold.  There was water dripping making that creepy drip sound.  And there was sort of a river that we were walking through as well. 

I was actually loving it.  I was like, “I’m cold, but I like it.  The bats are cute; I like it.”  I was having a great time.  I was like, “This is gonna be my career.  This is perfect.” 

We were looking for stalagmites because they are the ones that grow bottom to top and they sort of act as logbooks for past rainfall conditions.  The ones that are older are like older logbooks, so we like those.  We’re looking for the best stalagmites and we sort of come around the corner to a new passageway. 

In that area, the river gets a lot deeper so there are actually scuba divers and they're going cave diving.  I saw that and I was like, “That’s what I wanna do.  I wanna cave dive.” 

I was very excited.  I went up to them.  I was like, “Hi.  I’m a geologist.  I’m looking for stalagmites.”  And they were sort of like, “Okay.  We’re gonna go dive.”  But I was really, really excited. 

They were looking at the stalagmites that were deep down that I could never get to because I can’t scuba dive, so they're way deeper than we could even look at.  So I was like, “Next year, that’s gonna be me.” 

As long as I've been doing those awkward ice-breakers where they ask you for your superpower, I've always said that I would want to breathe underwater.  So the closest thing is scuba diving.  And I've always loved rocks so cave diving was like perfect. 

It’s been about two years now since I first went to a cave since I started grad school.  And I can’t hike right now and I can’t carry a big scuba gear pack and I definitely can’t cave dive because I’m in the process of getting diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which might sound familiar from those commercials they play a lot during football games.  I don't know why but they say like, “Lyrica has helped me with all my fibromyalgia pain.” 

They're like these 60-year-old women and they're in fields and they just want to hang out with their grandkids, but it’s me and I just want to like hang out with my cat and on my couch and everything hurts.  So it’s a chronic pain condition, which means that everything in my body hurts most of the time. 

When I go to the doctors, they ask me to rate my pain on a scale from one to ten.  As a scientist, I totally understand the need to put experiences into numbers and to have data that they can put down into my chart and sort of understand me through those numbers.  But as someone who’s living it, I have a really hard time quantifying the amount of pain that I’m in.  So I don't know what number it is to get out of bed and not be able to pick up my feet and to just shuffle along until I can sort of warm up my body enough to work, or to take two semesters of sign language classes and love it but have my hands hurt too much to sign, or to have all of my plans with my friends have an asterisk of “we’ll see how I feel that night.”

So I haven't figured out what number to tell them.  When I’m really grumpy, I do tell them, “How high would it have to be for you to help me or for you to want to do something for me here?” 

I haven't figured out the answer to how high it would have to be yet, but I have found out about this thing in CrossFit called the pain cave.  Obviously, I’m not doing CrossFit right now, but my friends told me about it.  It’s this concept where when you are exercising, you're doing these CrossFit things -- I don't know what they do, but the CrossFit things -- and you're in so much pain that you like are meditating and you're in this deeper version of yourself because you're in so much pain. 

I’m not familiar with that, but, for me, like a pain cave is literally a cave and I’m in pain and I have to go in it.  So it’s not the best thing yet, but this summer I decided I would like try it.  I was going to try to go caving with all these pain I've been having. 

I was in Spain for a short course.  It’s like a week-long summer camp for nerds, and it was this cave where they’ve literally found cavemen.  They've found like the first cave people in this cave.  So it was a super exciting opportunity to go and get to cave with cavemen, or the skeletons of them.  It turns out actually that the skeletons weren’t there.  They took them away, but they didn’t tell us that part, so it’s like this is where the skeleton was. 

So I went into this cave and I asked the woman who was guiding us, “How easy is this cave?”  “How hard is it to walk into it?”  The problem here is that there's no one-to-ten scale.  There's no metric for how hard a cave is. 

So she told me, “Yeah, it’s not bad.  It’s pretty easy.  It’s an easy walk in and easy walk down once you're in.” 

I was like, “Yeah, okay.”  It turns out I should have asked for what scale she was using, for some numbers.  It was not an easy cave. 

So after four hours of slipping on bat poop and walking over gravel, picture like a gravel driveway but on a slant, so I was walking down that for four hours holding onto a rope for dear life so every single part of my body hurt.  My hands felt like they were like ten times the size and my ankles felt like they just couldn’t support me any longer. 

I said, “Okay, it’s hour four.  You're doing great.”  I've made it through so far and the only choice I have is to keep going.  I don't actually have the choice to stop because I’m in a cave, so I have to get myself back out.  And I lean my arm just for a second on the side of this rock, and you're not usually supposed to touch stuff in the cave or the stalagmites and the stalactites.  They won’t grow if you touch it and the whole thing, but I was like, “This place, there's been rivers, there's been rocks.  It should be fine.” 

I leaned a little bit and turns out that the guide was right behind me and she said, “Excuse me.  Please move your hand.  This exact spot is where the cavemen walked and you're ruining it.”  So that was bad.

But on top of that, right now, because of my pain or in addition, still figuring that out too, my jaw locks open and closed and I can’t hold a scuba mouthpiece so I can’t get scuba certified.  So right now, I am a cave geologist who can’t cave and I am a scuba diving enthusiast-to-be that can’t scuba dive.  And I definitely can’t go into priceless archeological sites right now either. 

So I’m figuring out what I can do instead, because I do still have to finish my program and figure out what I’m going to do after that too.  I've gotten really good at microstratigraphy, which is basically science-talk, like Rachel said, for drawing lines on a computer.  It’s pretty easy to do it.  I just have to move my hand, so that’s at least a good thing to do. 

I've gotten really good at reading too.  I can read really carefully for a long time and just sit and look at it for hours on end. 

But to be serious, if you had me do one of those ice breakers again where you ask me what my superpower would be, I would still say that it would be to breathe underwater and it would not be to feel no pain.  Because even though I would not choose this pain, and I didn’t choose this pain, I’m going to make it work.  Thank you.