Bridget's Tumor

Stephanie Alberti
EVWP Summer 2009



I taught English in a juvenile correctional facility for eight years. Or tried to, anyway. I was a pleasant distraction for most of the inmates; my activities helped the time pass and gave them something to look forward to during the long hours they spent locked in their cells. When they weren’t in school they read books from our poorly stocked library or the ones that I often bought or borrowed from the public library. The rest of the time they plotted and planned, everything from how to steal the candy from some hapless teacher’s desk or how to ferment smuggled fruit juice from the cafeteria and turn it into wine, to what they were going to do with themselves once they were released.

We teachers were always trying to find ways to connect with our students and make learning fun. After all many, if not most, of these young people had been mediocre to bad students who often missed school before they were incarcerated. Once locked up, they rarely missed any. The Staff didn’t want to have to watch them during the day and would deliver them to school even if they had fairly high fevers and were throwing up. On top of everything else, they came to us hating most adults and teachers in particular.

At the time, I had a black Lab named Bridget and a couple of cats. One day I noticed a big lump under the skin on Bridget’s belly. I took her to the vet for tests and was told that they were going to have to remove the tumor. The next day over lunch at work, Mr. Jones, the science teacher, became excited about my story and requested I ask the vet if I could have the tumor, then bring it to school so his students could look at it under the microscope. I thought it sounded gross, but who am I to stand in the way of scientific research?

The day of the operation I sheepishly asked for the tumor and explained why I wanted it. The doctor laughed and brought it to me afterwards in a plastic medicine bottle, like the ones you get filled with prescription pills. It was difficult to see the mass without taking the top off, but he said he’d filled the bottle with formaldehyde to preserve it. Bridget would be fine; the tumor wasn’t malignant.

The next morning I presented the bottle to the science teacher.

“This is going to be great!” he effused. Science teachers get excited about weird things.

He took it from me and put it on his desk.

“We’ll look at it later this week.”

I told him to let me know how it went and continued on to my room.

During lunch Mr. Jones came to my room. The students returned to their cottages every day for two hours and we had planning time (when we weren’t having endless meetings.)

“You will not believe this!” he announced. “Someone has stolen Bridget’s tumor!”
We looked at each other and burst out laughing. Some student must have assumed it was a prescription. One of them had stolen the gym teacher’s heart medication earlier in the year. I would have loved to have seen it when that poor kid finally had some privacy to open up the bottle. He would have had to smuggle it back to the cottage, then go to the bathroom to be alone so he could open up the bottle. I can’t even imagine what he thought or did when he got it open!