Day 489: Oh the humanity!

Don't be fooled by the subject title. This is going to a serious-ish post.

This looks just like the one we use at the lab.

Today, I returned to guillotining rats and cracking their skulls open. It's been a while since I've guillotined a rat myself and it was incredibly disconcerting. It didn't help that this certain rat was not given the best treatment -- it was definitely alive and somewhat conscious while it's heart was being drained of blood, and it's liver and lung were being cut out; it was thrashing about in it's semi-alive state. Then, I get the joy of cutting it's head off only to have its eyes bug out as I sever his head from the rest of his body. It was not a pleasant image.

Then, I have to crack the skull and do other unpleasant things and the moral of this story is, it's hard to completely distance myself from the inhumanity of it all. I'm not a fan of rats. However, I think it's good to be grateful for their lives because they are contributing to the big picture.

I'm going to warn you right now. If you don't want to read about teeth and skull-cracking and brain-removing, skip ahead until you see this "@#$"...

As I was cracking the rat's skull open, I could feel its teeth jabbing into my finger. I had to cut its skin away from the skull and pull at the muscle and I was trying somewhat desperately not to gag at the idea that it's eye sockets were just about gone and its teeth were still jabbing my freaking finger.

@#$

Anyway, all in all, rats are rats. It's easy to feel bad for what we do to them (or so I think) but it's also surprisingly easy to dull one's senses to both the injustice and plain old creepyness of what I/we have to do.

Classes start tomorrow. And the new routine begins.

Day 416: Rats and chats

Hello!

Yesterday (Thursday) was quite a big day for me. I had my first calc test (it went fine enough). Then, at the lab, I extracted my first brain and sliced and did all the fun, gory stuff related to the lab's research.

NOT our actual experiment. Just samples of rat brains :P

In other news, I've been trying to run this experiment all week (with my fellow interns) and we kept f-ing it up. Yesterday, the experiment was successful (it's a two-day experiment) and today, we were able to scan our results. They were fairly successful, which is always good.

My actual boss, let's call him Dr. Z, is...interesting. I feel that I'm more of a speck on his radar than anything of actual concern. That doesn't make me any less grateful for the research opportunity. I just want to feel more...useful. And wanted. But whatever. We had a nice chat/discussion about my future at the lab and I think we're going to focus my tasks at the lab. I'm going to learn to run the experiment (it's called a Western blot) as well as I can. I'm also going to learn to troubleshoot the experiment, which seems to the be the best demonstration of my knowledge. Either way, more focused work at the lab. It can get pretty slow at times. Good thing I have books (I just finished Bernard Schlink's The Reader) and Calculus homework to keep me busy.

Tonight, lab people and I are going to dinner for my pseudo-boss, Mr. X. Mr. X is just the best. Today is his last full day. He's moving to a different lab next week. However, due to the lack of aptitude at our lab, Mr. X has decided to work part-time at our lab until August. (Yay!) Until then, we'll have to work hard to gain enough confidence and comfort with the goings-on of the lab.