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Today was a tiring, stressful, depressing, self degrading and interesting day.
Today I did neurosurgery or more like attempted to do it with the help of a disgruntled but more or less patient mentor who did the important difficult bits for me.
Yes before you get ur knickers in a bunch, it was on mice. or more like mouse.
Today was my first lesson under my mentor Dr. Ma Dong Liang on how to inject tracers into specific areas of the brain. Man...I thought it was goin to be all computer controlled and stuff but when he brought me down to the animal research area I was like.... NO SHIT! we have to do this MANUALLY?!!!COld sweat...
So...Ma Lao shi ( that's how everyone at the lab calls him except for the 'lao ban' who is the principle investigator at the lab ) brought me down to the lab in the morning and showed me the procedures and steps on how to inject tracers. Basically it consists of locating and noting certain coordinates on the skull and then using a handheld drill drill a burr hole into that area of the skull and insert a probe through that hole.
SO we breaked for lunch and then he told me to come back in the afternoon to do the other mouse by myself.
basically it's not as easy as monkey see monkey do.
went back after lunch, anaesthesized my mouse and started to attempt to clamp the mouse onto the sterostactic board (i.e the stage ) and lo and behold I COULDN! SO I had to call my mentor up in his lab and basically went '' Ma lao shi, bu xing ah!! WO lian tou dou bu leng jia zhu! '' ( translation : Dr. Ma, it's imposible! I can't even clamp the head! ). And so the poor fellow said he would come down.
And so began a terrible nerve wrecking 2 hours as he went through everything again this time with me handling most of the stuff. At times I could feel his frustration. At times I could feel my own frustration. At the end of it all I had arrived at a rather definite conclusion: 1. I will probably never branch into surgery because under stress or pressure I develop truly shaky hands. 2. I'm seriously doubting my ability to complete this project.
But I must say Dr. Ma is a rather nice guy. Sure enough he can be a really scary when he criticises you and raises his voice, but in general I think he can be considered nice to have sacrificed and entire day of his precious research time as oppose to the initially allocated time of half a day to coach me.
haha...and towards the end of it he decided that this whole stint would be a matter of exchanging tutelage. in his words '' ok. I will teach you how to do this research. and you teach me English.''
I was like.... ... '' I don't think I can accept this responsibility''
I'm afraid Dr. Ma you've received the short end of the stick. The way I see it it might only be a one way flow. Fair enough, today i've helped him with hopefully accurate translations of 2 words.
YAh...and I couldn believe it that he was serious about this whole English thingy, when he chastised me when I started to talk to him in mandarin '' I thought I told u to speak english to me '' ................. WAtakushi wa...ima wa...hontoni ... damadesu....
Yup, after that I had to feed 5 cages of the mice that we induced yesterday to find that one had died. And I left it in a biohazard bag on the floor. untied. NObody told me that it had to be tied and placed in a -20 degrees fridge. tomorrow I will have to run down there and pray that it's not a rotten mess.
Dear God, please let the mouse who was so unfortunate to be my first try at injectin a tracer live. I would be very grateful for that. Please god please...the poor thing does not desrve to die for my ineptitude.
good bye....