utenzi

I've been sick the past few days. Might be that swine flu thing but more likely just a cold. Damn thing is lingering though and due to the H1N1 scare, I can't go into work during normal hours. But I've still got to treat the mice I'm working on so I go in for a couple of hours after 6pm. All in all it's great for me. I can do as much in 2 hours after 6pm as in 5 hours during the regular day. Why, you ask? Because nobody talks to me! Half the damn workday is wasted with gabby co-workers. Damn annoying if you ask me. It's almost worth having this cold just to get away from all that idle chit-chat. And, NO, that's not my GD cold talking either! LOL A side effect of this schedule is that I'm getting a lot more sleep than usual. I figure the past two days I've averaged 10 hours of sleep a day versus my typical 4. This is wonderful. I normally can't sleep this much even using sleeping meds. I just can't sleep well at night but it's easy peas...

More mice pictures today. This rather trusting fellow is sleeping. See the Z's? Apparently he doesn't know what's in store for him. Actually he was in no danger on this particular day--I took the picture yesterday--because he hasn't exhibited any tumors yet. This line of mice is prone to tumors, and at a young age, and since we're testing a drug that shrinks the size of tumors--or so we hope--we need to use mice that already have tumors. Since this peacefully sleeping fellow is free of tumors we can't use him in the study. At least not yet. The other picture is of the fellow that is running this study. He went to medical school in India and did his internship there also. He wanted me to take this picture of him so he could send it back to some of his friends from med school. He wanted his classmates to see that in the USA we took more precautions with the animals than we do with human patients in surgery. Funny but true. Just look at all the protective clothing-...

I went to my doctor for the third time. Once the medical establishment gets their collective mitts on you, they don't let go easily. Anyway, this time she cut off a skin tag and burned off a growth on my finger. As this was happening I imagined some dead mice dancing with glee. Now it's my turn to have surgical scissors and anesthetic applied to my flesh. The parallel was pretty strong since the skin tag was right near my beltline on the right side and that's where I had implanted the matrigel sponges in my mice. So when my doctor was merrily cutting away, it was thematically similar to the work I had done on my 13 mice on Monday. One difference though, I survived the procedure, the mice, sadly enough, did not. In other medical news, now my doctor wants me to do to some echo thing and get my heart looked at. Damn doctors. I assure everyone that my heart is just fine. Doctors worry way too much. But just in case... I think I'll go and make sure it's okay.

I didn't feel like posting yesterday so here's just a picture of a mouse . Isn't she cute? I was weighing her (18.8 grams, in case you're curious) so as to know how much anesthetic to administer. I didn't get as much done as I wanted on Saturday but I did get my lawn mowed. I worked on it for over 90 minutes late on Friday, after work, and finished up Saturday morning with a similar span of time. I usually take 3 days to mow the thing so it was nice--albeit very sweaty--to get it done in just two sessions despite the heat. The only bad thing is that I won't get many bunny pictures for a while since they like the cover that longer grass provides.

It's been almost 25 years and that's a long time. 25 years since I last worked with lab animals, that is. Other than people, I mean. When I went to grad school back when I was 24, I left a job where I did a lot of rodent work, mostly mice and rats but occasionally rabbits too. Since then all my research has been on human tissue and I prefer it that way. Unfortunately my boss wants to have a mammalian model for our current work---up to now we'd been using chicken eggs for this---and so I'm working with mice again. Wheee. This mouse is under anesthesia so it's not in any pain but they (I injected 13 mice in all) no doubt have some discomfort when they wake up a half hour or so later. A sub-cutaneous injection isn't really painful but it is kinda annoying. Sorry mice!