Laboratory Insanity

I am sick. This statement is valid in multiple ways. First off, I have been quite ill physically for the past two weeks. We’ve all been passing around a severe cold, which has affectionately been named the “third floor plague.” I seem to have acquired a much worse form than anyone else, and have been stuck with congested sinuses, unbearable headaches, post-nasal drip, overall body aches, and a fever for fourteen days now. Enough is enough already! Fourteen days is ridiculous and just when I thought I was starting to feel better, I’ve found myself actually feeling even worse.

It’s recently been confirmed, however, that I am just as unhealthy from a mental standpoint. I began to suspect as much last week when I continued to drag myself into the lab everyday, despite my 103 fever and near total inability to breathe. I justified my trips in by convincing myself that I needed to take care of my cells (I did), and there were some experiments which really just needed to be completed (truthfully not really a big rush). Today, however, the declining state of my sanity is no longer just suspected – it is official.

Yesterday was one of those days in the lab where nothing works properly. After an 11 hour day in the lab, I finally went to finish my luciferase assay. I was told the new luminometer recently purchased by the lab was up and working (and had already been tested) so I decided to use that, instead of the crappy old one in shared resources which never seems to work properly. In the process of setting up and testing the luminometer, however, someone clearly forgot the minor eensie weensie step of ensuring that the plate was aligned. I was watching the results for each well and realizing that the results looked way off, and upon inspection of the actual plate, realized that the luminometer was squiring the luciferase reagent all over the plate, instead of actually into the wells. As such, I had to remake an entire plate and recalculate the volume for each well to ensure standardized protein concentrations, and try my luck at the shared resource luminometer. My results from that one came back just as strange (although at least this time, the reagent made it into the wells). That said, I decided to call it a day and boil down the rest of my lysate to use for a Western the next day.

This morning, at 4am, I woke up in a panic. I recalled putting the samples onto the heat block to boil them, but did I ever take them back off and move them to the freezer? My own laboratory incompetence never ceases to amaze me. I knew realistically that if the samples were still on the heat block, it wouldn’t matter whether or not I rushed to the lab – they were denatured and useless. I sat in bed, attempting to convince myself to just get a few more hours of sleep and check at a more reasonable hour. And, at 4:05am, when I was pulling on pants and brushing my teeth and preparing for a forty minute walk in the dark in pouring rain, I realized that every last ounce of sanity I ever possessed was completely destroyed by graduate school.

That’s right. I stepped into the lab this morning at 4:45am. And now, at 7:30pm, I am still in the lab waiting for a few things to finish. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised by my relative insanity – after all, at one point in my life, I actually thought that going to graduate school for a Ph.D. seemed like a good idea.