As we say goodbye to 2023 and ring in the New Year, this week’s classic episode is all about the novel.
Part 1: Feeling isolated in her new job as a particle accelerator operator at Fermilab, Cindy Joe finds comfort in the friendship of her unconventional pet.
Cindy Joe is an engineering physicist at Fermilab, America’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory. She got her bachelor’s degree in physics and became a licensed senior nuclear reactor operator at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. After starting at Fermilab, she worked as a particle accelerator operator for seven years before taking her current role with several experiments studying neutrinos, tiny particles that might hold the answers to some of the universe’s biggest mysteries. Cindy is a frequent and deeply passionate contributor to Fermilab’s educational outreach programs and has spoken to audiences from elementary school students to members of Congress.
Part 2: Actor Gail Thomas is invited to take part in a study testing mushrooms as treatment for depression in cancer survivors.
Gail Thomas has several resumes: writer/actor/teacher/filmmaker/lawyer. She is a Moth StorySLAM winner and has performed with RISK!, Sideshow Goshko, the Liar Show. She teaches for the Story Studio. Voiceover credits include David Letterman, Beavis and Butthead and Angelo Rules. Her short comedy, My BFF, rated 95% funny on Funny or Die and audience favorite at New Filmmakers. As a speechwriter for the Tribeca Film Festival and the Gotham Awards, her words were uttered by Oscar winners and fancy people with great clothes. Gail is currently working on her fashion sense.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
When I was just out of college I had a pet snail. This was when I was still living in Portland, Oregon. I had bought a box of strawberries from a fruit stand in a hurry and I hadn’t noticed until I got home that there was a little hitchhiker inside, so I decided to keep him. I named him Professor Snailworthy.
What I didn’t realize until I had one was how much personality snails have. He had favorite foods. He'd hide in his shell when his cage got too dirty. Very fastidious. He loved to sit in his water dish. And eventually, he outgrew the strawberry box and a friend bought him a terrarium to live in and he would crawl up to the lid and sort of stick there by suction hanging upside down like a bat.
Well, needless to say, I absolutely doted on the little guy and whenever I'd go on trips, I would get him a snail sitter. We would go on outings to the park. We’d go by bus and sometimes I'd get kind of strange looks, but not that many because it was Portland.
Cindy Joe shares her story at Fermilab in Batavia, IL in 2018. Photo by Sean Cochran.
So we’d get off the bus at the park and I would open the lid of his cage and let him out onto the grass to sort of taste the grasses of freedom and feel the wind in his eyestalks. At some point I would scoop him back in and we would go home.
Well, Professor Snailworthy grew and I think he thrived. He grew from a size that I hadn’t noticed in a strawberry box to maybe three to four inches long from nose to tail with a shell the size of a key lime. Wow, right?
And I came up with this whole imaginary back story in which maybe he would just not stop growing. He would just keep growing and growing and growing until one day he would get so big that he would break out of the backyard and go exploring. And maybe people would think that he was a monster rampaging the city and they would get scared until I showed up. And he would remember that I had loved and taken care of him and he would let me take him home.
I even sort of drew little draft sketches for a comic. Just remember that you heard it here first. And Hollywood, I'll be waiting to hear from you about movie options.
Well, during this time I moved from Portland to the Chicago suburbs. Of course, Professor Snailworthy went with me. I’m kind of rule follower so I looked up the airlines’ policies on snail transport. I don't know why. I couldn’t find any.
But I didn’t just want to stuff him in my suitcase and hope for the best, so I popped him in my water bottle and put plastic wrap over the top and poked little breathing holes. I packed him in my backpack and we both boarded the plane to our new life. I figured if anybody saw his silhouette on the x-ray and asked me any probing questions I would say that I was a collector of seashells, but nobody asked me any questions.
So I'd moved out here to Fermilab to become a particle accelerator operator. So the thing was I was moving across the country on my own, from my college town which I loved across the country, to a place where it snowed and I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t know anything either.
This job is so unique that they had to train me from the ground up, on the job and that meant that I was surrounded by the world’s experts and I was asking them what felt like incredibly stupid questions. The whole time I’m sort of battling to tamp down that part of my ego that needs to prove that I’m really smart too so that I can actually be open to all the new things that I need to learn, which is basically every single part of every single machine.
And the thing about the accelerators is they also operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year so everybody works a rotating shift schedule. You know, days, evenings, weekends, holidays, all of it, so it’s actually pretty tough to make outside friends. It’s a pretty tough lifestyle, especially when you're spending up to sixty hours a week at work.
Cindy Joe shares her story at Fermilab in Batavia, IL in 2018. Photo by Sean Cochran.
At first, I thought I might bond with my fellow operators but I didn’t really fit in. After a while, I started to feel invisible. I'd hear about what a good time everyone else was having at the activities that I hadn’t actually been invited to. Or when I brought up wanting to participate in a project, I'd be told they were already done, thanks.
I'd bring up my ideas but sometimes I'd feel completely overrun, like nobody was really listening to me at all, even in some situations where I was the one who was supposed to be in charge. I didn’t really think they were doing it on purpose exactly but I felt forgotten and, to be honest, that isn’t really a better feeling.
There could sometimes be periods of four or five days in a row in which I would maybe have no real-life contact with other human beings, and that was a really tough time.
Well, I'd graduated into, unfortunately, the worst part of the recession so I didn’t really feel like I could just leave because of a small thing like feeling really unhappy. Lots of people were genuinely worse off. And besides, I was kind of worried that maybe it was my fault that people didn’t like me, because I wasn’t likeable. They didn’t believe the things I said because I wasn’t knowledgeable. And they didn’t listen to me because I wasn’t worth listening to.
Well, there were a few things that kept me going in this period. One was my personal stubbornness and another was my fundamental belief in the value of what I was doing. I was so in love with physics. I felt like I was in a unique position. I had access on the ground level to… I was on the ground level of big science and I had a level of access a few people on the planet had. And that some of the great discoveries of physics were due in small part to my training and experience and my knowledge. And that maybe humanity would know more about the vast universe around us because I was working hard and really devoted to my job.
Late at night when everything was running smoothly and there was the sort of the humming and beeping and buzzing, I felt a sense of peace and of the rightness of things. Whenever I adjust the machines off-shift and I got a three percent increase in output, I felt proud. Whenever there were big discoveries announced and somebody got the Nobel Prize that was partly because of contributions from experiments here at Fermilab, which worked because of the work that I and my co-workers were doing, I felt like it was almost as if maybe one-millionth of that Nobel Prize was mine.
This had been what I had been wanting to discover when I moved out here, if this was something that I could devote my life to, and the answer felt like yes.
In retrospect, what I had been looking for was some type of validation. I wanted somebody else to notice me and tell me that I was good enough. And the stakes had been built up so high that it became all I thought about. If there's anything that scientists are good at, it is taking in data and drawing their own conclusions from it. And based upon the input I was getting, I had concluded that I must not belong there.
But in my loneliest periods there was one living, moving creature around. And as far as Professor Snailworthy was concerned, the sun rose and set on me, and my mango scraps. At some point, maybe with his help, I realized that my core beliefs that every single person mattered and had fundamental inherent value should maybe also apply to myself. That my different perspective was important. That my experiences were real and that my contributions were good. That I deserved no less gentle kindness and consideration than anyone else, and maybe I should treat myself like it. That was a shift in mindset that helped pull me out of my funk.
There is this concept in chemistry, the nucleation site. Conditions can be all ready for solid crystals to form out of a liquid solution, but maybe nothing will happen. Lots of times nothing will happen until a seed crystal is introduced. And I've often thought that friendship works the same way. That lots of times it’s not until you make one new friend then you meet all their friends and now, hey, you've got twenty new friends.
That’s what happened to me. Through that one friend I started meeting other people outside of my bubble and I started making a lot of new friends in my own right. I still worked a lot of weird hours. I still worked a lot of weird times but I started to feel like somebody mattered again and somebody that people would miss when she was gone.
Cindy Joe shares her story at Fermilab in Batavia, IL in 2018. Photo by Sean Cochran.
Well, one day, after we’d been together for about three years, I noticed that the Professor was being a little bit slow. I mean, he was a snail, but more than usual. But I was kind of busier now. I'd started to get known around the department for being good at what I did so that opened up all kinds of opportunities. I was doing a lot of outreach, I was serving on committees I was volunteering for everything I could so I didn’t spend as much time with him anymore. I'd change his water. I'd put in his food, but I didn’t just sort of sit and watch him anymore. We didn’t spend as much quality time together.
Then one day I noticed that he'd been inside of his shell for a while. He'd never really done that for so long before, so I started to worry that maybe something was seriously wrong. I sprayed him with water. I put in his favorite foods. I actually picked him up and put him in his water dish but he barely moved. Eventually, I had to accept that he was gone and he was never going to come out again.
I miss my Professor. If there is such a thing, he was a good snail. He's tenure may not have been long but he taught me a lot of things about patience, about life, about being picky about your choices but happy with the life that you make.
He taught me to look at things from a different perspective, even if that means that you have to hang upside down for a while. He taught me to feel the grass under my feet and the wind in my eyestalks. And he taught me that sometimes it is possible for you to grow and to change even if everyone thinks that you are too small.
He helped me make friends. Having a weird pet is a surprisingly great conversation starter. And he was the thing that I packed most carefully to take from my old life to my new. Then after a while, he taught me how to let go.
Someday, maybe, I will again be the girl with the weird pet, but I will never get over being grateful that I'd bought that particular box of strawberries and I will never forget my first snail. Thank you.
Part 2
When my nurse practitioner asked me if I wanted to do a study for cancer survivors with anxiety and depression, I was offended. It had been two years. I got through the chemo. I got through the relationship breakup. I even got through the loss of my little dog Rusty. I survived my cancer; a year later, he didn’t survive his.
But I'd gotten through the post-traumatic stress syndrome. I didn’t overreact at Laundromats anymore. I could be flexible about where I folded my towels. In fact, cancer was good for my self-esteem.
I learned something that a Midwestern girl doesn’t necessarily know. I learned how to stand up for myself. My decisions were important. I stood up to doctors, I stood up to family members, I stood up to cab drivers, I stood up to that guy at the Laundromat. Anybody who wasn’t good for me was out. I got rid of all the toxic people, and there was no one left.
I was different now. I had changed into somebody that I didn’t really know. My life was really exciting when I was making treatment decisions, chemo or radiation, life or death. Now that I was back with the regular people, it was like Starbucks or the local café, soymilk or skim. It was dull and ordinary. I wanted to talk to people who had life-or-death situations. I felt separate, like I had gone off to this far planet and then I came back and I didn’t speak the language anymore.
So, “All right,” I said to my nurse practitioner. “Tell me about this study.”
She ushered them into the room, Dr. Ross, who’s very straitlaced, sort of short clean-cut haircut and a tweed jacket, and sort of a nerdy-looking awkward fellow, about mid-thirties, accompanied by Gabby, whose hair was up in a bun. She wore a flowy skirt and they sat in front of me. Dr. Ross explained that this study had been done previously at UCLA and Johns Hopkins and that I would only need to do one drug and then one placebo. There would also be four months of free therapy. Now, I didn’t really want any more therapy, but I do like a good deal.
So I said, “All right. So, tell me what’s the drug?”
“Psilocybin.”
I was like, “What?” Magic mushrooms. Oh, my God. Timothy Leary and like Ram Dass and all that stuff. Magic mushrooms. I'd never had the guts to do them myself. I knew other people who’d had, but I was sort of a straitlaced kid in college and in my twenties and I already was kind of hyper and a little bit of an over-thinker so I was sure that I would be the person that would jump off the roof.
But this was an FDA study. My friend Joe says I’m the luckiest unlucky person he's ever met. I got cancer, but I get to do mushrooms, legally with FDA approval. It’s like winning the cancer lottery. Sign me up.
I was Patient Number Thirteen. We started the therapy and there were lots of forms to fill out. Gabby had them. It was like, Rate one to five. Do you feel depressed? How are you eating? Have you gained weight? Are you happy? Do you have suicidal thoughts? The forms went on and on.
Finally, it came the day for the dosing. I’m so excited. They had asked me to bring items from home that were comforting for me. So I brought Rusty the dog’s little squeaky duck and I brought some pictures and some – they had flowers there for me, and snacks. I walked into the room and they had two chairs where the two doctors, Dr. Ross and Dr. Kyrustalli, would sit and watch me on this fold-out futon while I had my experience. I felt that might be kind of boring for them, but it was my day.
So we got in a circle and we held hands. They had a chalice, actually, that they had this little pill that had been measured especially for me that I guess had all the synthetic mushroomy stuff inside it, or not. It was in a little glass jar with my name on it. They put it in the chalice.
And we stood in a circle and held hands and he asked me for my intention. I’m like, “Peace, love, my intention is to do the drug. Give me the drug.”
I took the drug and I lay down. They had a pillow and a blanket, and I put it over me. They also had gotten together these NYU doctors, this whole team of people, and made this playlist of like crazy music that I could listen to the whole time. And they had an eye mask for me to wear.
My friends had all told me, “You know, you should really go out into the woods. You need to be with nature if you're gonna do ‘shrooms. Gotta do it in nature.”
I’m like, “This is an FDA study. I’m pretty sure they're not gonna let me out of the room.”
So I lay down and I sat there and I didn’t feel anything. I was like, “Oh, damn. This is the placebo.” Then, about thirty minutes in, there was this rush of information into my head. It was just all coming at the same time. It was like every philosophy class, every yoga class, every deep thought that I'd ever heard of or I thought I had and heard in my own life was all coming in at the same time. It was a lot of information.
There weren’t really like dancing lampshades like I thought there would be. It was more like little sketches and stuff. I saw two papier-mâché colorful cow heads going across. And I saw a cat that was chewing on my bicycle. I don't know what that meant. But it was a lot of information.
I clutched onto my little dog Rusty’s toy and I opened up my eye mask to look at Dr. Ross and he's sitting there and he's like, “Trust and let go. TLO. Trust and let go.”
Gail Thomas shares her story at the Kraine Theater in New York in July 2017.
So I put the eye mask back on and it just kept coming, all the information. Then I suddenly saw this beautiful field, like Little House on the Prairie, and it was this gorgeous open field with a little house in the back. There was this lady standing in the middle of the field. She looked so happy and so healthy, and I thought maybe she was me, or somebody I admire greatly.
Then I saw a table. I suddenly was over this table and it was sort of this round table, like a pie chart, and there were these little sections that were divided out of the table. In one of the sections I looked at it, I looked down on top of it and it was cancer at the table. I was like, “Oh, my God. Cancer’s at the table.”
And I looked and there was more and then my family was at the table. They were all sitting around. I thought about how I judged them, because they hadn’t said the right thing when I had cancer. My brother wanted me to do tons of treatment and my sister didn’t want to do research and my mom came for the surgery but she wouldn’t help me out with anything. I’m waiting on her, but then I realized they tried their best. They meant well. They love me. They're actually there for me.
Then I started to see more things and I thought about how I was an artist and I used to paint and I used to draw and I don't do that anymore. I thought about how I went on stage and I used to perform and I really liked that, but I didn’t do it anymore. I wanted to participate because I didn’t need to be isolated, because we’re all connected. And that didn’t make any sense. You have to participate because it doesn’t matter if you're old or young or sick or healthy. You're all together because we’re all connected.
So death has a purpose because the purpose of death is it tells you that you should live. You should really have a good time because you're not dead. You should just have fun. You're alive.
So it just kept going. Then the IRS was at the table. I looked at the table and the IRS was there, because it was just after tax time. Then I was really annoyed because I was like, “I don't want the IRS in this trip. It’s supposed to be a spiritual journey.” Then I realized the IRS is at the table because everything is connected. Death and life and my family and cancer and the IRS, they all belong at the table together because we’re all connected.
Eventually, the trip sort of faded out. I took off my eye mask and I looked at the doctors and they asked me some more questions. They had me fill out some more forms and I wrote everything down. That’s why I remember it. My friend picked me up and they gave me some flowers and I went home in a cab.
I remember being in the cab driving home and we passed these two women sitting at a café, an outdoor café and I was like, “Look at them. They're friends. They're talking. They're really happy they're friends. They like to be together. Isn’t that fantastic?”
I had the great privilege of being Patient Number Thirteen out of twenty-nine. The results of the study, I guess they call it a paper, was published this past December in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. The name of the study, the paper was “Rapid and Sustained Symptom Reduction Following Psilocybin Treatment for Anxiety and Depression in Patients with Life-Threatening Cancer: A Randomized Controlled Trial.”
It’s long, too. It was very successful. In over 80 percent of us they noted a rapid and immediate decrease in stress that lasted at least six months.
That was five years ago and I have changed. Things happen. You know, the things that happen are not actually good or they're bad. They're just things that happen. I don't have a perfect life now, I don’t have the perfect job or relationship, but things happen.
One of the things that happened is I was cast in a commercial playing the supportive sister of a cancer survivor. In one of the times we were shooting everything, I walked by the monitor and I noticed the camera was focused above and looking down on our family’s table where we would all sit together and support each other.
We are all connected. Someone made this building; they built this building. Somebody put all the buildings all over New York City and they made the subway and they made the streets and they made the beer and they made your shirt and they made my dress. Sometimes I feel lonely, but I know that I’m not alone and I do not feel separate anymore. Thank you.