I have empathy for laboratory mice. Both they and I know what it is like to be tested, examined, and analyzed. We know what it is like to have our data graphed, and our statistics extrapolated and inferred. We know what it is like to be a specimen.

When I was thirteen, my weight plummeted, leading to the sharp decline of my heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose levels, and hormone levels. My period stopped, and my breasts shrunk. I was weak, depressed, and obsessive-compulsive.

For nearly two years, my life was that of a research specimen. I was taken to pediatricians, endocrinologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists all over the Bay Area: at Stanford University, Palo Alto Medical Foundation, Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital, and many other places. I had blood drawn, urine collected, EKGs taken, blood pressure observed, and, of course, countless weight checks. Diets and medicines were prescribed to raise my weight and hormone levels, as well as quell my OCD. I was poked, prodded, and felt by countless M.D.-certified hands. The plethora of data collected from my numerous tests was graphed and plotted, and then analyzed and scrutinized by various professionals. Despite all this medicine and science, I was still a teenage girl, confused and upset at all this examination of me and my data. In Biology class, we studied population and individual data from all kinds of organisms. Each day in class pained me; I felt like one of the assayed plants or animals. Small and powerless, my existence was merely line and points on a weight graph, a BMI chart. I was not a person: I was data.

Things have changed. My heart rate, blood pressure, and glucose and hormone levels are back to normal. My weight and BMI are still a bit under average, but not as dramatically low as they once were. I am happier and less obsessive than before. I am no longer taken to doctors thrice a week to be examined and tested. I feel a bit more like a regular teenager, but I’m still not out of the fray. The graphs and data of my past haunt me in my dreams, sometimes getting to me and reducing me to nothing more than a point on a line, cold and statistical. I am still a case study, and always will be. I feel for the white, red-eyed laboratory rodents. We share the same analyzed, assayed past; we are both specimens.