Carl the Death Driver / Ch-3 / Pt-1

Annette was lovely. A young research scientist involved in the earliest exploration of nanoparticle fabrication. Bold and brilliant, she was highly dedicated to her studies with limited social pursuits. Still, Annette had a clear vision for the happiness and comfort a steady companion could bring. Sometime between early November and an endless rainy day in late December, she came to realize a longing for Carl that crossed over into being in love.

At that time, Annette was as an undergrad in San Diego. She was completing her degree in chemical engineering with plans for a master’s. Carl was also an undergrad and halfway through his third year of a prestigious bioengineering program. They first met at a midnight coffee klatsch in front of the Geisel Library. What began as a chance encounter during a late-night study break, evolved into regular afternoons and evenings together on the quiet floors of the library. Six months after their chance meeting, Annette went onto Caltech in Pasadena for her Master of Science in Chemistry while Carl remained in San Diego to complete his five year program at UCSD. Their relationship not only endured but flourished with travel up and down the I-5.

Through two years and 120 miles of highway and backstreets, they spent every other weekend together and never missed a break. When Annette completed her thesis and landed her first position in Los Angeles, Carl feared he could lose her to an industry and city that would consume her and possibly elevate her stress induced wants and real world needs. Over time, he was sure that anything he could provide from afar would fall short and become less significant in her eyes.

Carl passed on a partial scholarship award toward a specialized master’s program for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. He followed Annette to the sprawling city of dreams and into the beginning of a career path he was not prepared for and didn’t want. Carl found his first work in the depths of the Industrial District. Among the city blocks of unadorned buildings, he arrived each workday to enter a gated parking lot adjacent to a purpose-built structure with an anonymous facade. Carl was the newest member of a nascent design engineering group. This coveted group operated within a little-known subcontractor supplier to a globally recognized San Francisco-based medical device company.

Annette and Carl became lost in the daily focus of adoring one another with little recognition for the wonderful life they were building together. They established themselves in a garden style apartment complex from the 1940s near the heart of the neighborhood in Larchmont Village. They were within a short walk of shops, restaurants, and a family owned grocery store. A five-minute drive in any direction brought them to an expansive park, a small stage theatre, a boutique museum, or busy downtown L.A.

After the first year in this perfect part of town, Annette began to scout home listings. At first, she scanned the Sunday classifieds and the shorthand descriptions. As the possibilities became more real in Annette’s mind, she stepped into a local real estate office and sampled the snacks at a few open houses. Annette explored a number of modest single family homes in a nearby area with tree-lined streets flanked by craftsman-era houses. The stores and restaurants they enjoyed would no longer be within walking distance, but this older community featured a strong school system and an active community center. It was a place for young families and young couples ready to embark on parenthood.

Annette and Carl were deeply engrossed in their respective work, each driven by ambition but lacking a shared vision for their future together. While the idea of forming a family lingered in Annette’s thoughts as she scouted homes, the couple never openly discussed marriage or children. Their relationship existed primarily in a technical sphere – sharing the language of the lab, focusing on process optimization and problem solving. Their time together outside of work became more about recovery and mutual support as they navigated the complex politics of their corporate environments. Both were learning to operate as engineering talent within systems controlled by lawyers and profit-focused executives, leaving little mind space for deeper personal discussions about their shared future.

The company Annette worked with had little competition in some of the earliest breakthroughs in particle synthesis with real application across a multitude of industries. She was positioned within a prized group and as the company was experiencing exponential growth, most members of Annette’s department eventually became leading figures of the company. She was handsomely rewarded, and on her own, Annette could afford the down payment on the starter home she had her eye on. But she yearned to make this milestone purchase together with Carl, seeing it as another building block of their shared future. Annette knew it would have to wait until he could make more regular contributions to their joint savings. Those were his conditions not hers. Annette did not want Carl to feel bad about his infrequent additions to their pooled house money. So over time, she was careful to only match what Carl could contribute and placed the rest in a separate savings account.

Carl never regretted his decision to forego a higher degree. He was with a steady business enjoying ongoing growth and doing great things for the client company in San Francisco. They were dynamic and highly innovative, involved in cutting edge biotech product design and breakthrough neuroscience endeavors under their own brand name with a deep pocketed distribution partner.

Carl was growing into his role at work and he relished the many opportunities to contribute to early protypes that found their way into preclinical testing. His enthusiasm and efforts to help wherever needed eventually brought about a highly unexpected career altering setback. It was a hard blow and Carl spent many hours analyzing the possible politics of the situation and the changes that came about in the place he had looked forward to working at each day.

Carl’s frustration surfaced when he was steered away from the design engineering group involved in exotic developments that matched his talent and personal passion. Abruptly and with little say in the matter, Carl was temporarily placed in a group that barely saw the light of day, yet served as the backbone profit center to the entire company. Internally, this other group was referred to as Central Collections. Carl became an inmate to a white room filled with far more mainframes than desks and a messy soundscape of cooling fans, keyboard clacking, and the ceaseless back-n-forth whirring of giant reels of magnetic tape. Central Collections was a medical billing operation with double digit annual growth made possible through computing technology transcending the private service sector in the early 1970s.

While Carl was attending university, computer science was a rare and emerging field of study. Yet Carl and a few classmates had access to an expensive and bulky minicomputer hidden away in a secure technology annex of the school’s mathematics department. After hours and unbeknownst to the department’s faculty, Carl and his buddies camped in the annex multiple times each week to  test drive theories and models involving considerable batches of computations. By necessity they became self-taught programmers in one of the earliest high-level programming languages, FORTRAN. Over decades, Carl would become a self-trained expert in other programming languages including C++ and Java. When Carl revealed this other talent in an effort to help a work colleague resolve a discovered defect in the company’s medical billing software, he was loaned out to the highly secure confines of Central Collections. There he remained as a captive employee deemed as too vital to depart and his temporary stay ultimately became permanent.

After years of continuous delay to move toward the nearby family community and actually start a family of their own, Annette became determined to put the cart before the horse. If she could become pregnant, perhaps Carl would emerge from his stubborn shell of stall tactics and rigid routines of incessant work. He might come to realize that a new living environment was necessary to raise a child and he might accept the viability of a lifestyle change through Annette’s secret stash of funds.

In the end, a child is what Carl hoped and prayed for as well. And it developed into the greater imperative of their loving relationship as they faced an unforeseen struggle with infertility. After seeking the council of their regular doctor, a specialist placed Annette on a regimen of clomiphene citrate to bring about a regular ovulation cycle. When conception continued to elude the couple, the dosage was increased in subsequent cycles. A year later it was clear that the medication would not deliver the results the couple had hoped for. They stepped back from this desire for a child of their own. They took an indefinite break from the emotional instability that came with each attempt and failure.

As the couple moved into their early thirties, their bond became stronger. They continued to embrace their city life, the culture that surround them, and their ongoing career growth. Each was seen as a critically valuable talent within their respective company. The family dream that had eluded them for years was revisited when Annette experienced occasional abdominal pains along with bouts of fatigue and nausea. Her menstrual cycle was always highly irregular and had been nonexistent for months. Annette did not want to present the possibility to Carl until she was certain. Hiding her excitement over morning breakfast, Annette took the day off from work to take a long walk through the park and reflect before she stepped into her doctor’s office.

There was no baby. There was abdominal swelling and other signs related to pregnancy, but Annette was not pregnant. By dinner time, she had found the courage to hide her most horrific thoughts. She did not tell Carl about her visit to the doctor’s office earlier in the day, nor anything about her appointment with an oncologist later in the week.

When Annette was initially diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer, she was 34 years old. Before the exploratory surgery and the biopsies that confirmed the spread into her abdominal cavity and lymph nodes, Annette had many weeks of waiting filled with both hope and despair. Between the initial blood tests for tumor markers and the definitive diagnosis that came with surgery and pathological analysis of tissue samples, their life was in disarray. In these weeks, Carl could not process the worst and maintained a high degree of denial along with escape through work and self-made projects around the apartment. Annette experienced stifling anxiety. She did envision the worst and needed to do something that allowed her to express control and a degree of self-determination. Annette accessed her secret savings intended for the down payment of a family home and put the funds toward the purchase of a new car for Carl.

She knew that Carl would never do this for himself. He would never buy himself something new and beautiful. He would always find an excuse to keep things simple and the same. Annette purchased the new vehicle, and in the registration process, she ordered a vanity plate to remind Carl of her everlasting love for him. A few months beyond age 36, Annette was gone.