Indecent Exposure

When I was in high school, I started to get forgetful and began misplacing things. I never really thought anything of it, just that I had too many things going on in my life and wasn’t able to keep track of everything. It came into focus, however, when I became sick with an unidentifiable illness. I had been feeling under the weather for a week or so, with increasing joint pain and a slowly climbing fever. When I woke up and the thermometer read 104, my mother decided it was time to keep me home from school and drag me to the doctor. I was poked and prodded, and he decided that I was depressed, the join pain was a result of the depression, and the depression was caused because I didn’t want to leave for college. My mother rolled her eyes, pointed out that she was a psychologist, she would likely have picked up on something indicating that I was depressed, and that I couldn’t wait to leave the house and go to college (I pretty much started counting down my sophomore year of high school). Two days later, my fever was up to 105.5, and back I went to the doctor, where, once again, he insisted that I was making myself ill as a result of depression. My mother was discussing my symptoms with a coworker, who commented that it sounded similar to when she had Lyme disease. Doing some quick research online and realizing that I did spend all my summers working at a camp in the hills of Pennsylvania teaching girls how to ride horses, sleeping in tents in the tick-infested woods, I was once again dragged to the doctor where my mother insisted that I be tested for Lyme disease. The doctor assured my mother that it was not the case, but finally due to my mother’s persistence, drew blood. Sure enough, when the ELISA and Western blot testing results came back with an incredibly high titer, I was finally diagnosed with late persistent Lyme disease, meaning I had the disease likely for two or three years, and it had never been diagnosed. Suddenly the memory loss and confusion made sense, as the infection spread to my spinal cord and resulted in a slew of nervous system problems.

Even after several rounds of treatment and eventually managing the disease, the associated arthritis and neural problems persist. I’ve learned to deal with them; however, I was always warned if I noticed things worsening in either area to get myself to a doctor right away. There have always been moments ever since then, such as the time I was changing the water in my fishbowl my freshman year of college, and when all was said and done, put the fish and the fishbowl in the refrigerator and the Brita pitcher on the shelf (lucky for the fish, my next-door neighbor wandered in and inquired about the sudden absence of the fish before he had the chance to freeze to death). Usually, however, it’s been isolated incidences and I haven’t worried. Now, however, I’m not so sure.

I’ve had many more problems this year with concentration – I can spend 2 hours reading a chapter from my cell book, and then have no recollection of about which pathway I was just reading. I accounted it to a general lack of interest. I’ve noticed a drastic decrease in my spelling abilities of regular everyday words (I typed out ‘green tea’ as ‘grean tee’ the other day), but I figured that as phrases such as ‘aminoimidazole carboxamide ribonucleotide transformylase’ (and their associated spellings) become part of everyday language, you just have to push out something else. I’ve been putting things in the wrong places again, like putting the cumin in the refrigerator and the lime juice in the cabinet. But hey, I’m overworked and stressed out, so that’s expected, right?

This morning started out exactly like every other morning. My alarm went off, I crawled out of bed, opened the curtains, and neatly made my bed and fluffed my pillows. I ate a yogurt while checking my email and browsing ESPN.com. Sick of my unruly frizzy hair, I took the time this morning to flat iron it. I put on a cashmere Faire Isle belted cardigan over an ivory silk camisole, and my ballet flats covered with platinum-colored sequences which always result in so many complements. I put on a pearl necklace and my pearl earrings, packed up my lunch, and tossed my laptop into my tote bag. As I was heading out of my room, I slipped on my favorite spring jacket, a three-quarter length ivory colored jacket with tiny pastel flowers embroidered across the fabric. I was feeling pretty well put together for the day and was halfway through the living room when I paused, because I felt like I was missing something. I thought for a moment, and dashed back into my room to grab my medical center ID badge. I went to clip it onto my pocket just like always, when I was surprised to discover that there was no pocket on which to clip the ID badge… there was no pocket, because I wasn’t wearing any pants. Yes, that’s right. My pants were still lying across the chair where I had set them out when I decided what to wear. I put on my sweater, my shoes, my jewelry, straightened my hair… and forgot to put on pants.

I’ve known for a while that I needed to call up a neurologist because I just wasn’t all there mentally anymore, but I kept coming up with excuses. That’s it – no more excuses, it’s time to call. It’s not just forgetting where I left my Palm Pilot anymore. When it’s forgetting something as socially required as, say, pants, it’s time to acknowledge that there’s a real problem. After all, as Mark Twain once said, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

We're Moving!!

We’re a movin’ on up,
To the east side (of the research building)
To a deluxe apartment (more lab space) in the sky.

At the lab meeting yesterday, we received the official word that WE’RE MOVING! We’ve been granted the space occupied by the former director of the cancer center… the one who left and moved on to supposedly greener pastures at another research university. I cannot begin to express how thrilled I am at the potential for more space, seeing as how with our current lab situation, I have neither my own lab bench nor a desk (or a computer, for that matter, since a desk is a prerequisite for that). Our lab is growing quickly (in addition to me as the newest thesis student, a new post-doc just came three weeks ago) and we’re spread out throughout the building, in three different rooms on two different floors, and it does get to be a pain to run up and down the stairs twenty times a day when you need something (or someone) from the lab on a different floor. While I’ve been able to get by with sharing bench space with the new post-doc and mooching off of others when they are not at the bench and I’ve adjusted to sitting hunched over typing away on my personal laptop on an unoccupied chair… frankly, it doesn’t exactly make me the most productive. But the opportunity to get my own desk, where I can actually keep things so I don’t have to haul them back and forth from the lab all the time, where I can spread out my work… it will make me feel like I really have a home in the lab! And maybe, just maybe, if I have my own horizontal surface area, I’ll work up the courage to ask if the lab can supply me with a computer, because I’m not the hugest fan of dragging my laptop back and forth with me everyday (although I am very glad to have gone with the 12” version for this very reason). Mostly, it would just be nice to have a computer on the actual network. We have wireless set up in the lab so I can access the internet, but I can’t print anything from my own computer, and since I have a PC and most of the computers are Macs, the programs aren’t always compatible (i.e. I use pDRAW and they use MacVector, and if I want to print out a plasmid map, I have to wait until I go home at the end of the day, print it out, and hope I remember to bring it in the next day. And if I actually need it for something during the day, well, then I’m screwed, because pDRAW isn’t on the one other PC in the lab and I don’t know the master password to install it). So basically – I’m just relieved to finally have someplace to call my own. Maybe I’ll even get my own set of pipettes – oh, the little things that bring joy to nerdy graduate students.

That aside, I can’t believe it’s approaching the end of March already. Seriously, where did the time go? I feel like I never get half of my to-do list completed in a day, and yet I spend all my time in lab or studying… so I don’t know where the wasted time winds up. Thankfully after an exam on Friday there will be a bit of breathing time until the first week of May, when I have two exams, a take-home exam, and two papers all due within four days. And after exams, then I am shipped off to the National Cancer Institute to complete a rotation which will train me in molecular pharmacology work, so I can bring the knowledge back into my lab and hopefully use it for my thesis project. But in the meantime, I’m slowly sneaking out of lab for the week to study for Friday’s exam (and I must question who would possibly be cruel enough to schedule an exam during March Madness? This is like the most religious holiday for sports fanatics like me – how am I supposed to care about ephrins and Wnt signaling and epithelial-to-mesenchymal transformations when there is basketball to watch and brackets to follow? Sheesh!).

Happy Spring, everyone – nothing like bringing in the new season with a day of snow (and to think, it reached 81 degrees two weeks ago, and today the high won’t be above 35).

Room for Improvement

There are plenty of times when I feel out of place at school. Our classes and the research building are part of the medical school complex, so most of the time, it seems like I have more encounters with medical students than with biomedical graduate students. When I walk through the hallways in my lab coat, it’s knee length and branded in the corner with the name of my lab (probably so that if I’ve escaped and am hanging out in the hallway, all the PIs know to which lab I belong and are able to drag me back to make sure I get back to work). Meanwhile, the halls are full of medical students, decked in short coats labeled with their own names, stethoscopes around their necks, dog-eared pocket guides to pharmacology shoved into their pockets. The residents from the cancer center walk by occasionally, and the scrub-clad surgical residents can sometimes be found passed out on the couches, enjoying the few moments before their pagers call them back to work. Among the 3^rd and 4^th year medical students, there is the steady buzz about who got to assist in what procedure on whom. Yes, as a research scientist, it is quite easy to feel insignificant, overlooked, and out of place in a clinical setting. Today, however, I stuck out even more than usual. I was like the proverbial sore thumb… or, more specifically, the clean forehead.

As the good little Jewish girl that I am, I had forgotten what today was. I didn’t realize until lunch, when I noticed a person with a blob of schmootz on their forehead. I was wondering if they were aware of the dirt and contemplating if I should say something when it dawned on me that what appeared to be a thumbprint was actually a cross, drawn on in a rush, and that it was, indeed, Ash Wednesday. Considering that I now attend a Jesuit university, by mid-afternoon, 70% of those surrounding me had crosses on their foreheads. The priest who roams the halls of the medical school even jokingly offered to draw a Star of David on my forehead if I was feeling left out, although he was afraid his artistic skills were not up to the task.

Along with Ash Wednesday comes the start of Lent, which meant that I overheard the conversations of all the students discussing the objects which they would be giving up for the next forty days. Responses ranged from chocolate to watching American Idol, to my personal favorite – a girl who said that she would be giving up sleeping with guys whose last names she had not yet learned (now that’s staying in line with those Catholic values!). I thought about my friends and what they had sacrificed from the past, and how, for forty days, I would hear them bitch and moan about how much they missed chocolate or Diet Coke or mint chocolate chip ice cream, and then Easter came (I think Lent is over at Easter but my Catholicism knowledge is not up to par) and an entire chocolate bunny would be consumed in two minutes. I may not be Catholic, but I feel like the point of sacrificing something should be to improve yourself as a person and to change a negative aspect into a positive, and I’m not exactly sure how giving up vodka or Oreos for five and a half weeks really does that.

Lately, I’ve been feeling somewhat down about my experiences thus far in graduate school. Not that I hate my lab work or my classmates (quite the contrary on both instances), but more down because I feel like I’m not getting the most out of my educational experiences. I’m not doing as well in my classes as I would like to be doing, and while I’m learning new techniques in the lab, I often feel like I’m not retaining and understanding everything as well as I could be. My PI has done nothing but praise me throughout my time in his lab, complementing me most recently on my time management skills and the ease with which I can handle a tough course load and many hours in the lab. Whenever I meet with my PI to discuss progress with my project, he likes to show me data that others in the lab are generating and quiz me on it – asking me to interpret what I am seeing and how I would troubleshoot the problems, without having a great deal of knowledge of the project. Last week, after responding with the ‘correct’ answer, a grin spread across my PI’s face and he congratulated me on really thinking like a scientist. But… I don’t feel like a scientist! I know I’m still years away from my PhD, but when I think about the vast difference in knowledge between myself and a sixth year student, I can’t imagine learning that much information in that time period. I really feel like I’m not getting as much as I should be out of my experiences thus far.

While hearing everyone else today discuss Lent, I started thinking about what I could do to improve myself. I decided that the area which needed the most improvement right now was my training to one day become an actual scientist – I needed a way to expand my knowledge and feel more confident about what I am learning. And so I decided, in a completely non-religious but perhaps inspired by Lent fashion, that I would make my own personal sacrifice in order to further myself as an oncology graduate student. A bad habit which I have developed over the past few months is the abuse of the snooze button on my alarm clock. Lately, I have started setting my alarm for a half hour before I actually have to get out of bed, so I can just lie in bed, under the covers, and muster up the courage to face the day. It’s a terrible use of time, and I’ve been very displeased with myself for continuing this. Therefore, I am making the pledge to myself, the scientist in training, to redirect this time in a way that will further my education and training… to my absolute least favorite part of science thus far – the journal article. I hate reading articles because to understand a single article, I find myself doing five literature searchers for other articles to attempt to figure out a method used in the paper or a pathway being discussed, often getting frustrated with everything I do not understand. However, I also realize that the best way to increase my knowledge in my particular area which I am currently researching in the lab is through papers, and have an entire binder in the lab of papers which I need to read. Therefore, I have decided that to improve myself, I am going to be getting up when my alarm goes off the first time, and dedicating at least a half hour every morning before I leave for campus to tackling part of paper. Sure, maybe it will take me a few days to make it through an article, but if I take the time to actually understand everything, I am confident that it will pay off in the end.

I may not be Catholic, but I think Lent has helped me realize exactly what I need to do to get myself back on track. Sometimes I feel a little awkward at a Jesuit school, but today I was glad to be here. There is always room for improvement, and I have found my way to make myself a better person and hopefully a better researcher.