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Yesterday, the 26th of June, was truly a day to remember.
It was the first day that I reported to the Epilepsy Research Labs at the National Neuroscience Institute just behind TTSH ( Tan Tock Seng Hospital )
Managed to find my way and was soon happily bundled off to HR to do idemnity documentation and other red tape legislations. yes...my mentor had so generously agreed to take me on but forgot about the other administrative stuff. haha.
Well...so after running here there and everywhere with the help of a very friendly sempai to get
lockers, Labcoat and trying to windle an security access card on the sidelines to no avail finally went back to the lab where I was assigned a project. Yes....my own project. which apparently I have to do everything by myself. And by everything I mean, all investigations and that means I have to learn all the protocols for the different methods of experimentation. So in view of my rather short stay with them abt 2 mths and the fact that I now have to write my own paper, it has been deemed that within this first week I will have to achiever what pple take at least a month to master and that is I have to learn how to pilocarpine induce status epilepticus in mice, perfuse them ( i.e fix their organs with formaldehyde), retrieve their brains, cut their brains into coronal sections and fix them on slides and learn how to read the slides. And I also have to learn how to physical inject tracers in a specific point in the piriform cortex, which from what I've read in their past publications involves the mastering of stereotactically injecting the tracer into a live mouse, encompassing drilling a minute burr hole into the skull of the critter whlst it's still alive.
OMG.....I'm so SCREWED.
First off....I had no idea I was goin to be assigned my own project and that I had to complete it within my stint. I thought I was just going to assist in one of the investigators projects. Needless to say my newly assigned mentor is in a high state of doubt at this point in time.
Secondly, I thought that la dida it's basic neuroanatomy and neurophysiology which i think i'm kinda fluent in. Yes it is but of a TOTAL new subspecies.... yes ladies and gentlemen, I spent the first 4 hours in the morning before lunch trying to cram in RAT neuroanatomy and embryogenesis with the help of a book that's about twice the thickness of a 7th edition Kumar and Clark ( medical bible ) and a dog eared manual with pictorial representations of coronal and longitudinal sections of Rat brain.
AFter lunch, sempai brought me down to meet my new best frens ( sorry B1 and B2 u guys will have to take a back seat). Man the smell that first met me when we went to the animal research labs was nauseating on first whiff. Didn' really help tat it was located next to the mortuary i suppose.
haha but i think that was the start of my really exciting day. within 3 hr I had learnt how to stimulate status epilepticus in pilocarpine induced mice, how to catch mice by the tail ( though I still don't know how to grab them by the ears because they scare the shit out of me when they wriggle abt ) , and to put this in a short and rather delicate way I made up for the lack of anatomy dissection teaching in 1st year using a mouse model. And to wrap things up I also practiced brain retrieval. I must say that almost nothing in animal research goes to waste. Especially when theirs a CLUELESS student attachee to ur lab.
Wow... after this I feel so confident in doing open chest surgery.
well...that's my exciting day. tune in for more misadventures!