Lab Girl

Jahren describes the experience of “mania,” this time using the second person pronoun. In this state, you don’t need normal things life food or sleep, and “you don’t fear life and you don’t fear death” (145). She describes the experience of an unnamed man holding her, trying to help her, and advising her to take something for her condition. She pushes him away and tells him everything is fine.She is full of ideas and the need to document them, so she records them on cassettes.

She describes a come down from mania in which sensory stimuli overwhelm her. Someone finds her and holds her after discovering hair and a tooth on the floor. She wakes into a “gray sadness” (146) and finally consults a doctor, who prescribes her medication.

Years later, Jahren will leave Atlanta and leave all the cassette tapes she recorded behind.

This chapter describes a road trip from Georgia to San Francisco which coincides with Jahren’s manic cycling. In the summer of 1998, Jahren and Bill study plants’ sweating rates. As they go into the field, Jahren reacts strongly to poison ivy, one reaction which causes an edema that is treated in the hospital with a corticosteroid injection. Jahren enters a manic upswing as she leaves the hospital and believes she has found an answer to her and Bill’s research question.