It's About Time

Time To Take Back Dog Labs by Suzanne M. Schweikert M.D. Copyright 2003 All Rights Reserved Comments, thoughts, and personal experiences on time related topics are welcome. Email: Dr.Schweikert@WritersMonthly.com Author's Note: This column is dedicated to my grandmother, Phyllis Lois (Mills) (McAvoy) Hart, who died on September 14, 2003. Throughout my life, she always had a few previously stray dogs living with her, leaving me with a legacy of love for them...

Last month, on October 24^th, Americans witnessed a brand-spanking new holiday. It was called Take Back Your Time Day, or Time Day. Never heard of it? Don’t fret. You can pick any day of the year to take back your time. This date was chosen by some smart people in Seattle because it falls nine weeks before the end of 2003, the extra amount of time off work that Europeans have compared to Americans. This includes vacation time, a shorter average work week (35 hours), family leave and sick time. But hey, nine weeks is nine weeks. It sounds pretty straightforward, right?

However, when I’ve attempted to explain the concept of Take Back Your Time Day to some of my friends and colleagues, I’ve been hit by mixed emotions, glazed-over stares of incomprehension, and downright protests. "I like my job… I think everyone should work more," one guy said to me, without blinking. Another woman complained, "I can barely find time to get away as it is now, and then all my work is waiting for me when I get back. Going on vacation is almost not worth it." Apparently, people around me are unclear on the concept.

The thing is, I thought everyone would rally behind the cause, jump into political action, and demand more vacation time. Instead, their reactions got me asking, what is the real point of taking back your time, anyways? Is it simply to legislate a mandatory three weeks of vacation time and boost our tourism dollar? Is it a battle between the forces of evil (our inherent human laziness) and good (the righteous American work ethic)? Or is it something more meaningful, more personal, and more difficult to define?

And so I asked myself, "What would I do with nine weeks off, if I had it?" Nothing too specific came to mind. All I could think of were generalizations like relax, be creative, and clean out my storage space (ok, that’s specific, but it’s never going to happen). But then, when I wasn’t even looking, an answer came to me. I was at a party, which was being held to celebrate the end of something spectacularly cruel: mandatory dog labs at our local medical school.

For those of you who have not followed this issue, dog labs were a component of the first-year medical student curriculum. These labs involved anesthetizing 60 or more dogs, injecting them with various medications, and surgically removing their hearts. The dogs were raised in cages for several years leading up to their demise, a fact which does not strike me as a blow for humanity. In the end, the animals were pain free (we hope), but they were all killed.

My first contact with these dog labs was eleven years ago, when I joined the ranks of the first-year medical school class. Of my fellow 126 students, twenty-five or so refused to participate. The pharmacology professor who ran the labs was outraged by our demonstration of so-called morality. How on earth did we, lowly first year medical students, know what was good for us? (As we all know from watching television's E.R., medical students know absolutely nothing.)

Our professor grudgingly gave us an alternative assignment, more as punishment for our naiveté than as a learning experience. In order to do this assignment, we each had to explain, alone in his office, our reasons for refusal. When it was my turn to go, I conjured up visions of a soldier confessing to a commanding officer that I could not shoot a human being, even in self-defense. While I wanted to be in this army, to fight against disease and suffering, this was not the way I could win the war. The professor must have sensed my general insubordination. He attacked my morals. He told me, not attempting to hide the disgust in his voice, that if I could not stand to see another living being die, then perhaps I did not "have what it takes to be a physician." And he said I should rethink my career choice.

With nothing to lose, I asked him if he thought there was a difference between watching a living being die and killing it. I don’t remember what his answer was, probably because he had none. A guffaw perhaps, or a sneer. I realize now that he had no way to articulate the difference. I also realize that he truly did not understand there even was one.

I have been a physician now for eight years. I believe now, as I did then, that there is a difference. I also believe that, in order to justify the use of animal research to save lives and alleviate suffering, we must not abuse this privilege with research that is cruel and benefits no one. My one regret is having let eleven years go by without making any further effort to stop the dog labs. In the past decade, I have found many worthwhile things to do, but never the time to do this one thing. But lucky for the dogs, someone else did.

Two people in particular, doctors Nancy Harrison and Larry Hansen, pushed against the establishment, launched e-mail campaigns, orchestrated a petition of physicians opposed to dog labs, and rallied people committed to animal rights, until their voices were heard. And it’s not like they didn’t have other obligations. Larry is a full time professor of neuro-anatomy and Nancy is a full time pathologist. And yet, they investigated the underlying issues, risked their own careers, and pushed for change, despite criticism and potential backlash.

I mention their story, not because I am surprised that people cared so much about dogs (I am more surprised when they don’t). Rather, it strikes me as unique that they spent so much of their time to fight for this issue. And this, I believe, is what Take Back Your Time Day is all about. What matters is not the exact things we do with our time, but simply that we do not go through life without taking the time to find out what those things are that matter to us.

In the end, you could say that Larry’s and Nancy’s time was well spent. In a recent medical school class, over half the students refused to do the dog labs, and the wave of dissent eventually became too great for the school to ignore. As of this fall, first year medical students will no longer kill dogs raised in cages, in order to learn principles of pharmacology and surgery. Instead, those principles will be learned with computer simulated models and during hospital rotations. Surgical principles will be taught by surgeons. It all makes sense. It seems only fair that doing surgery and prescribing medications is a privilege students earn during their four years of medical school, not a right they have upon entering it.

As I stood there at this celebration party, making small talk about this amazing victory, and feeling happy that dogs would no longer live and die in medical school basements for non-existent reasons, I suddenly realized—I was surrounded by PETA-people. You know, those crazy folks who have nothing better to do than hold candlelight vigils over lab mice, protest chickens’ living conditions, and picket actresses who wear fur coats.

When I surreptitiously glanced down at my shoes to see if, by some lucky chance, they were covered in something besides leather, a PETA woman standing next to me whispered, "Don’t worry, you can’t tell the difference between leather and pleather." I breathed a sigh of relief. It dawned on me that these people weren’t completely "out there." They were simply spending time to fight for what they believed in—animal rights. But they also lived in the real world, where people wear leather shoes. When I asked one guest how she came to be a member of PETA, she told me that most PETA members reached the decision to fight for the rights of animals through a series of baby steps, in a life of disparate and, at times, contradictory experiences.

And then it occurred to me. Taking back our time might also require a series of baby steps, and a life of disparate and, at times, contradictory experiences. After all, we can’t all take nine weeks off work and expect our jobs to be there for us when we return. And we probably wouldn’t know what to do with those nine weeks anyways. Some of us would get bored and depressed and wish we were back at work.

But we can start learning to value the time we do have off, by not feeling so guilty about taking it, and by not pressuring our coworkers to work to the point of battle fatigue. At least, I think we can. We can even learn to place value on what other people choose to do when they are not working at a typical job—whether it’s raising children, writing poetry, communing with nature, giving bird watching demonstrations, or protesting dog labs. We may say we value all these things, but when a coworker takes time off, are we really as supportive as we could be? Or do we feel angry and jealous?

On October 24th, Writer’s Monthly had a party, in which we asked people to imagine what they would do with an extra nine weeks off each year. Their answers varied, just as the people who came did. There were technical people, manual trade workers, students, teachers, writers, musicians, doctors, lawyers, and others. But instead of defining themselves by their job or trade, we asked them to define themselves by their time, by how they would choose to spend it. Instead of telling everyone "I’m a legal secretary," one might say "I’m a suspense writer, a knock-out cook, a surfer-in-training, and a down to earth father and friend."

In the end, our time is defined only in its passing. In those nine weeks, 68 days, 1,632 hours, or 97,920 minutes of time from October 24^th until the end of 2003, we will define who we are, and who we were, in the same spectacular moments. Taking one’s time back from over-work is only the first step. The real answer, and the real fun, is in figuring out what matters most to us. Bringing the dog labs to an end just happened to be what Nancy and Larry wanted to do, what mattered most to them. And I, for one, am glad they took the time to figure it out.

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