Schrödinger’s Ovaries

“What I know is this: Some part of me, however small, is already dead. I live around it.”

Editor’s Note: On March 22, Catapult published an essay by Jessica Furseth about her diagnosis of Lynch Syndrome and her increased risk of certain types of cancers. Soon after, Emma Bogdonoff shared with us a copy of her Winter 2017 essay “Schrödinger’s  Ovaries,” originally published in The Threepenny Review. We have found additional examples of the Schrödinger’s experiment framework in other health- and cancer-related essays and believe the similarity to be coincidental. As Emma’s excellent essay was previously unavailable online, Catapult is pleased to be able to reprint it with permission.

The Laws of Quantum Mechanics

i. Put a cat in a steel box, along with a flask of hydrocyanic acid. Also in the box: a tiny bit of radioactive material and a Geiger counter. If the radioactive material decays, the Geiger counter releases a little hammer that shatters the flask. Poor cat (dead cat). If not, the cat lives (still a poor cat, clearly having ruthlessly curious owners).

ii. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, until we take a measurement to see if the particle has decayed, it is in a superposition of states. Which is to say, it is both decayed and not-decayed at the same time. What does this mean for our unloved cat? He, too, is now superposed. Both alive and dead until we, like gods in lab coats, open the box.

iii. Here is what I would like to know: What does the cat feel like, being both alive and dead? Would he prefer a quick resolution? If it were up to the cat, would he stay inside that box to avoid the very real possibility of being 100% dead? Or is the press of the steel walls and the constant question of his own mortality too much? Better to know, he might say, were he both un-boxed and gifted with speech, than to survive in a state of constant superposition.

Steel Boxes

i. At the age of forty-eight my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It was both a tragedy (too young) and a miracle (caught early by the grace of an overcautious gynecologist). She had scheduled the appointment a month earlier than normal and attributes this to divine intervention. Days after the appointment, they cut into my mother and took out two tumors. The one that had been detected by the gynecologist was the smaller of the two; the other was the size of a lemon. After months of hats and radiation, remission. This is not the story of my mother’s cancer.

ii. In the great afterwards, they tested her for genetic mutation. Too young, they said, and they were right. BRCA1: a human gene that produces tumor-suppressing proteins. BRCA1 positive: a term for a person with a mutation to his or her BRCA1 gene, such that the gene no longer does its gene-ly duty. How much of a difference does one mutation in one gene out of roughly 25,000 make? Apparently, a lot. By the age of seventy, a 60% chance of breast cancer and a 40% chance of ovarian cancer.

iii. The child of a BRCA positive person has a 50% chance of inheriting the mutation. A coin flip. Phenomenal odds for the lottery. Less great for the cat.

Time Evolution

i. Before I leave for college, I think, I will get tested. My mother pressures me to wait. “You’re so young! You don’t need to have that hanging over your head.” I want to say, it is already hanging over my head. I want to say, I can already feel the press of the walls. But I don’t. She has already had to deal with ovarian cancer. Instead, I wait.

ii. In college, I think, I will definitely get tested. Best to get it over with. In the absence of measurement, the cat is only half-alive. There is always a part of him that is dead. But I must learn the rules of quantum mechanics, and read about cats, and there are so many problem sets to do, and so many exams to take, and it is never the right time.

iii. After college, I think, I need to get to tested. “You’re only twenty-three,” my mother says. “No rush.” And I am moving, all the time. New York, Australia, Vermont, Colorado, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Montana . . . Three months here, seven months there. No time to find doctors, dentists, gynecologists. It all falls by the wayside. I push it from my mind. A friend asks what I am running away from, and I laugh as though she has told me the world’s best joke.

iv. “You still haven’t gotten tested?” my mother asks. “You really ought to go. After all, it’s better to know.”

Wave Function Collapse

i. At the heart of Schrödinger’s Paradox is a question about the type of world that we live in: Is it a concrete place, full of objects in specific positions that move in predictable ways? Or is it amorphous, probabilistic, and significantly more random than we once thought? Does God play dice?

ii. Understand: The probabilities that live at the heart of quantum mechanics are the not the comfortable, epistemic probabilities that we know and love. It is easy to misconstrue the cat’s predicament: We do not know whether he’s alive or dead, and therefore there is a 50% chance of one and 50% chance of the other. But this is a misconstruction. If we embrace wholeheartedly all these complicated quantum mechanical suppositions, the probability is objective, not epistemic. The cat is both alive and dead, simultaneously. Our ignorance has nothing to do with it.

iii. So why is it that we only ever see an alive cat or a dead cat, not some hard-to-imagine hybrid? What changes when we open the box?

iv. In the world of quantum mechanics, measurement is pivotal. It is intrusive. There is no gentle culling of information while leaving the world unchanged. Every measurement causes collapse. We live in a probabilistic world, but whenever we poke at a probability with our chubby fingers it collapses into something concrete.

v. What is more, measurement is irrevocable. Once the box has been opened, there is no returning the cat to his superposed state. We can close and open the box another hundred times, and the cat will remain 100% dead.

Measurement

i. I wait until the worst of times. I leave my aunt’s deathbed for the appointment. She is dying of lung cancer. Down the coast, my grandmother is dying of pancreatic cancer.

ii. If I asked my mother, she would tell me that it was all going to turn out fine. That she had a feeling. That the universe owed me some good news.

iii. I am not my mother, and I think that the universe does not give a fuck about my coin flip.

Superposition

Choose your own ending. Or don’t. Let them co-exist.

Amorphous Places

i. I do not tell anyone. I take the folder of facts and probabilities home with me, and put it on the table. I make the follow-up appointments, as I have been told to do. I do not call my father; his sister has just died. I do not call my mother; her mother is dying. I hold the information in my hands like something fragile and try not to look at it too hard.

ii. At the follow-up with the breast specialist, the doctor tells me, “Nothing to worry about, but we’ll just check to be sure.” Then she says, “Nothing to worry about, but there’s a small mass. Let’s do a mammogram to be sure.” The mammogram specialist says, “Nothing to worry about, but let’s do an ultrasound.” The ultrasound tech says, “Nothing to worry about, but let’s do a biopsy.” The biopsy doctor says, “I can’t see anything to stick my needle in, but let’s do an MRI.”

iii. I spend a week waiting for results. The panic is quiet but heavy, keeping me pressed down into my bed late into the day. When the doctor’s office calls, they use words like, “cystic” and “dense.” They tell me not to worry, to repeat all tests in six months.

iv. Here then, is the new pattern: tests and panic, followed by willful forgetting, followed by more tests and more panic. CA125s, MRIs, mammograms, ultrasounds. I learn the odd thrumming language of the MRI machine. I look away as they stick the needles in my skin. It never becomes old and unthreatening.

v. My odds are better than a coin flip. I am young. I have knowledge and therefore power. What I know is this: Some part of me, however small, is already dead. I live around it.

vi. Inside a steel box, a cat sits, waiting. He is waiting for the box to open, waiting for the inevitable collapse. To be both alive and dead is tiring. It is time to know.