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YEsterday marked the end of the first week of trials.
Really invigorating week. For those of you following this series you should noe why.
If not. Shame on you. GO READ!
So on friday, I injected tracer into my final mouse for the week.
It managed to survive the 2 hour long surgery. ( yes! I managed to cut down an hour on my time! )
Hopefully it will survive the weekend. I must say that this time round I was more confident and I actually managed to control and steady my hand as I was drilling the burr hole and it was more accurate than thursday mouse. Well have to wait a weak to perfuse and retrieve their brains to check and see. Please let them survive the week.
And yes! Lo and behold the mouse that I did on thursday survived the critical 24 h!
I was so overjoyed to see her scampering about and eating when I went down to the lab.
And miracles abound the right sided weakness was gone too!
Right so friday afternoon after lunch I was taught the next protocol on how to mount slices of mouse brain onto slides. This happens after we have perfused the mouse and retrieved its brain and slice it into coronal slices.
Right so my sempai sat me down at the 6th floor lab with a small trough of buffer and a row of little wells filled with sliced brain. and the idea is to fix these slices onto slides.
And basically it's like arranging an MRI scan on a slide. You've got to get the right slices in ascending order of size and consecutive order with reference to the hippocampus. So you empty all your slices into the buffer solution and slide your slide into it and using a very fine art brush you select the pieces that you wanna place in order and gently manouvere them onto the slide. It's a truly delicate job because any rough movt results in the shredding of valuable results.
But my goodness it really sends u into cross eyed lunacy. Half way into my fourth slide I was feeling truly nauseous.
Haha thankfully it was a friday so we were let off at 5pm! whoohoo!
This evening, 1 july, went for dinner at my brother's in laws place.
It was a nice enough evening and they were a friendly and funny elderly couple.
The food wasn't all that good. Actually it kinda sucked. But the soup was nice. And the desert was good too.
Well, the two of them are doctors. The father's a diagnostic consultant with a great love of art and their entire home is filled with his paintings and some of his purchases. He does impressionistic style paintings on sceneries and scenes that he witnessed on his travels around the world which are really extensive and impressive. Some of them are really striking whilst others are....well let's just say 'special'.
Yah for those of you wondering wat a diagnostic consultant watch '' House''. He's citation is that of Dr. House. A doctor who solves cases which no one else can solve. aka...he's a freaking sharp and smart guy.
But he was really funny too so that was good. And upon steppin into their front yard I realised the whole saying about medicine being a fraternity. Somehow it doesn't matter at which level of the medical echelon to becoming a doc, you are somehow part of this association where pure strangers just hover around you and are so personal with you just because you are part of this morbid society. From the gate they were like '' Oh you've brought your sister this time.'' And then all of a sudden there was a flurry of activity around me. ARGH!
and no sooner had I stepped into the house and the mum was like showing me around the house their backyard and pool. And then inside they started asking the usual questions on what I would like to specialise in and life in UK. And the best part was that on the ride to their place, my brother had specifically stated that we were not to talk about work. Kudos to you asshole.
And the dad was showing me his pictures and giving me a running commentary about his travels. which was really quite interesting. Learnt quite a bit about different art styles and techniques.
Yup so that's basically my friday and saturday.
I need to SLEEP!