Life of a Lab Rat

Whut?

Your Aspie score: 90 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 121 of 200
You seem to have both Aspie and neurotypical traits

Which makes me. . . normal? Heaven forbid!

So far, today, I am more or less successfully resisting the urge to greet everyone I meet with "Why, yo ho ho" in my best Leslie Phillips voice.

Instead, let's have a sing-song.

Fifteen cells in a dead man's flask
Yo ho ho and a bottle of DMEM
Myco and strep's done for the rest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of DMEM

That's quite enough, I think.

Nothing to do with life in the lab, except that I came across it when trying to think of a way to put something in my article.

I just read

Microsoft's search excels in spreading malware

Everybody knows that Windows Live Search, Microsoft's little search engine that could, lags far behind Google and Yahoo! in the race to capture eyeballs. Here's one place where the software juggernaut's offering leads the pack: referrals for sites that actively try to infect end users' machines with some of the vilest malware known to man.

Question: If you can ask if you're delirious, does that automatically mean you're not?

It's all right, I've cut the analgesic dosage (mmm codeine) so I should be reasonably coherent now.

Went to the quack's on Friday, and fortunately did not get to see the muppet who managed to miss the pneumal party when I crawled into his office last Thursday, barely able to breathe and unable to stand. Instead I saw a nice lady doctor who continued my roxithromycin prescription and also prescribed a cephalosporin. That is because I said I did not want a penicillin, as we use beta-lactamases in the lab all the time and I did not want to take the risk that anything pathological in me had managed to acquire resistance. Unlikely I know, but always a worry.

I don't actually think she knew what I was talking about, but tried her best. She had never prescribed cephalosporins before, and knew nothing about them, but spent a good few minutes looking in various books before deciding what to do. She didn't even know who Ed Abraham was, which is a shame, because I did my DPhil in The Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, where the whole antibiotic story took off.

Medical update.

It's not what you know, it is who you know, especially when it comes to medical matters. And if you know someone who can prescribe antibiotics and get you into A & E's X-ray unit on a Sunday morning then you must be doing pretty well. The good news is that it does not appear to be a fractured rib.

The bad news is that even if it was, you wouldn't be able to see it because of the consolidated pneumonia and pulmonary effusion ("50% of hemithorax"). My specialist's comment was "People with chest X-rays like that are usually already in hospital". Oh, and "It's getting better, but you're taking a week off".

Well, this puts the old thumb into perspective.

I appear to have a fractured rib. And it hurts. I've raided the pharmacy for anything with codeine in it and am trying not to overdose.

If I can find somewhere comfortable to sit and type I might post some of the things I've been meaning to talk about for months. But then again my brain might turn into Swiss cheese and I won't be able to think at all.

The thing about the opposable thumb is that you do not notice it until it does not function correctly. You can achieve this effect by breaking a glass pasteur and shoving the jagged end into the end of the opposable thumb, and spending the rest of the day (and the next, so far) with a whopping great field dressing on it.

Have you any idea how difficult it is to wind or use a Gilson with a non-functional dominant thumb? Or how tacky red smears look on a white keyboard? The only good thing is that I had already Hibiscrubbed my hands and sprayed them with 70% ethanol and the hood was sterile, so I should not be too worried about infection.

We do not deal well with grief.

Hysterical women of Middle-Eastern origin can be seen on news bulletins, throwing their hands in the air and dignity to the wind. In the (political) 'West' we are expected to grieve in private, to take time off for the funeral and affairs of estate, then back to work, to bury ourselves rather than the deceased. Our friends and colleagues are embarrassed. They do not know how to cope with our grief, they do know not if we want an arm around the shoulder or someone just to cry with.

And in the relentless, cutting world we, especially we scientists, inhabit any extra sick or vacation time is weakness; 'You have had your compassionate leave - what is your problem?' Worse, maybe; 'Do the experiment! Write the paper! The French/italians/British/Americans are coming!'.

It's not just bereavement. A spousal argument in the morning can destroy a day's work. Rushing to get back to pick up the children will cause mistakes that if you are lucky you will notice there and then and note in your lab book so that the next day when you look at the PCR gel you do not have to ask, 'what the hell happened there?'.

It might be great science, but it's ruining me as a human being.

Talking of hugs, Alethea could probably do with some TLC. Failing that, leave supportive comments.

The most effective countermeasure against zombie outbreaks has previously been shown to be aerial bombardment. Troops on the ground are not favoured because they are ineffective at the dismemberment – a prerequisite for zombie inactivation. However, carefully targeted high explosives successfully achieve this. A regrettable corollary is collateral damage, as nearby human life is inevitably destroyed. However, these innocent bystanders would, in the absence of intervention, would likely have become zombies – and a threat to their neighbours. This contingency is introduced into the model as a ‘user-directed interaction’ which destroys humans and zombies, making them functionally equivalent: in other words, non-infectious.

The elder pawn (hmm, that sounds vaguely Lovecraftian) wanted to take her bicycle into school today. Turns out they're doing a project on machines. She asked if I had ever taken the back off a washing machine and when I said I had, she said

'Wow! What did it look like?'

I told her why I had taken the machine apart (to find out how it worked so that I could mend it) and from there went on to say actually, that's what I do at work. No, not mend washing machines — I take things apart to see how they work. I did not use the phrase 'the very fabric of Life' (I was tempted; that kind of thing does not faze nine year olds as much as you might think) but we did have an interesting discussion about dissection and atom bombs and all sorts of groovy stuff.