Warning: Mad Scientist Crossing

When I decided to attend graduate school, I didn’t realize I would be putting my life in such danger. I mean, I knew about all the associated mental health problems, because everyone who is struggling through a Ph.D. goes through periods of hopelessness and depression, right? And besides, there has to be some mental defect initially in anyone who thinks that pursuing a Ph.D. in the sciences is a good plan. There’s all the bench-work associated dangers that I knew I would encounter… working with radiation, subjecting myself to enough ethidium bromide that has likely worked its way through my gloves into my skin where it has intercalated into my DNA and as such I am probably in the process of sprouting an additional finger on my left hand, dealing with all the chemicals that are labeled “USE ONLY IN CHEMICAL HOOD” on a regular old lab bench since our current lab doesn’t have a fume hood… those sort of dangers. Little did I know that I would be attacked by laboratory equipment or watch my life flash before my eyes as I was nearly flattened by a crazed man with an animal transport cart.
After our weekly evening lab meeting, we (a fellow PhD friend, who is doing a rotation through my thesis lab and I) were heading out of the building, escaping back into freedom, about to walk through the swinging double doors that lead from the research building into the pre-clinical science building. Luckily for us, she must have extraordinary hearing abilities to notice the rapid squeek of a wheel, because suddenly she paused and switched from walking along my left side to my right. A split second later, a ridiculously loud ‘BANG’ noise causes us both to literally jump in the air, as a man (who, fittingly, looked exactly like a mad scientist – the wild grey hair sticking up in every direction, crazy too-many-hours-sniffing-chemicals look in his eye) pushing an empty animal transport cart comes flying full-speed through the door. Had my friend not moved and dragged me with her, we most certainly would have been flatted into the wall… or at least been left with very bloody broken noses. The traditional, sane way of walking down that hallway is to walk up to the swinging doors, push one open by hand, and pull the cart through. Maybe this guy figured that since it was after 6pm the hallway would be empty… except that plenty of people are still in the building until late. Maybe he was thinking that he would just put two poor first year Ph.D. students out of their misery the week before finals. Maybe he just wasn’t thinking at all. Regardless, I now realize that getting a Ph.D. is more than just hard work and dedication, it’s about just trying to make it past attacking laboratory equipment and crazy fellow researchers in one piece!

Still Treading Water

Whew! It’s sure been a while, hasn’t it? Here I am addressing how I can’t remember to put on my pants in the morning and how I’m being flooded out of my apartment… and then I don’t update for three weeks. That’s just not nice of me, and I apologize. It’s not that I haven’t had the intent to blog during that time… just that usually by the time I got back from the lab, spent a few hours screaming on the phone to someone about the continual state of disrepair of my apartment, and wasted time sitting around scowling at the thought of having to spend yet another night uncomfortably squashed attempting to sleep on the couch, I just ran out of time. But, I am happy to report, that Sunday night was the first night I was able to sleep in my own bed, which was in my own room, for which I shell out a mere $900/month as my half of the rent despite the fact that my room was uninhabitable for thirteen days. It was a rough two weeks of fighting with the apartment complex, calling other apartments in the area begging to see if they had open apartments so we could just call it quits here and move, and I will confess to one mini-breakdown after I was promised work would be completed (and nothing had been done) in which I called the voicemail of the apartment, left a very long and winded message, and then just sat down in the middle of the still wet and mildewy carpet and just cried. I am glad to report, however, that after thirteen consecutive nights on a couch, I returned home for a few days for Passover, and came back on Sunday to a newly plastered, newly painted ceiling over my newly steam-cleaned only slightly smelling like mildew carpeting. Of course, I also returned to find water dripping out of one of the kitchen cabinets, which, coincidentally, was a result of a broken pipe three apartments above me. I just can’t get a break, can I? Next time around, I’m moving into the penthouse suite – the upstairs plumbing has not been kind to me.

So now, after my brief but necessary Passover seder break, we’ve reached the home stretch. Two papers (epidemiology, pharmacology), one take home slide identification final (pathology), and two in-class finals (cell biology, epidemiology) to compete by May 3^rd… and then first year is officially over! Sadly, first I have to finish everything and ensure a B average in all my classes which I am ashamed to admit is worrying me a tad, as I can’t remember anything that I study for cell biology (as far as the neurological problems are concerned, I’ve become very buddy-buddy with the neurologist and his staff as I have had about 4 liters of blood drawn on multiple occasions for testing, but so far nothing has been identified… and I’ve been quadruple checking to ensure that I am properly dressed before leaving each morning). I’m really looking forward to the end of classes though, because it means I’ll get to be in the lab full time and get to really move forward with my project. In other exciting (at least for me) news, last week in my first attempt, I successfully cloned the full-length gene on which I am working (see? I really am learning new things from graduate school!), tomorrow I get to learn insect cell culture from the post-doc who will be leaving for maternity leave so that I can help take over the RHA production while she is gone, and once finals are over I get to try my hand at PCR cloning. Then, once July rolls around, I’m being shipped out to the National Cancer Institute for a two-month rotation to learn molecular pharmacology laboratory techniques so I can tie in some pharmacology work with my thesis project. And just think – being in the lab full-time this summer means even more opportunities for me to screw up experiments and break expensive laboratory equipment, which means more disastrously humorous events about which to blog! But until then, I have two long weeks of writing, studying (and attempting to retain the knowledge that I attempt to learn with a mind like a sieve), laboratory-ing, not drowning in the multiple floods that continue to spring up in the apartment, and hopefully remembering to wear my pants.

April Showers

I tried to think of some witty introduction, but I really can’t think of way to put a humorous twist on this. My life has turned into an episode of Law & Order, but just the beginning portion.. you know, where they introduce what is going to happen by showing a few unimportant people chatting who then stumble upon a dead body and the woman screams, and the police come, and you never see or think about those people again. My roommate and I are like those people, except that we are in the midst of our own disaster as a result.

Our little episode of Law & Order starts out as such: the scene is set inside an apartment, a clock glows 3:00am in the corner, and a fire alarm goes off. The apartment occupant jumps out of bed, throws on clothes, and dashes outside, only to discover that nobody else from the entire apartment complex comes. Perplexed, she walks back into the apartment to find out why the alarm went off mysteriously in only her apartment, turns on a light, and finds a cascade of water gushing out of the light fixtures and electric outlets. Panicking over the mixture of water and electricity, she calls the fire department and the emergency apartment maintenance man. The maintenance man heads to the apartment directly upstairs, the source of the suspected flooding, and knocks on the door. When there is no answer, he opens the door, and finds himself shin-deep in water. Sloshing through the water, he opens the door to the bathroom… and finds the occupant of the apartment, drowned in the bathtub.

If this were a real episode of ­Law & Order, this is where we would cut to the catchy theme song and the views of New York City. Then, Ed Green and Lennie Briscoe show up to inspect the scene, and we never give another thought to the girls in the flooding apartment below. Except that this isn’t an episode of Law & Order… it’s the current story of my life.

No, I didn’t know the person living above our apartment who was apparently incredibly drunk and no, this most certainly isn't an April Fool's joke although my father thought it was when I called him with the news. All I know is that my planned day of finishing up a paper for my cancer prevention course has suddenly become a bit more stressful than originally anticipated. The carpet people have already come and ripped up the edges of the carpet and inserted massive dryers underneath, but right now the carpet is the least of my concern. The water was pouring out of the light fixtures in the kitchen and the bathroom, which is where the main carpet damage was done. The living room seems pretty unharmed, as is my roommate's room. My room, however, is a slightly different story. Well over half the ceiling of the room and part of the ceiling of my walk-in closet is completely water damaged, and the water is spreading across rapidly, so I am sure by now the entire ceiling is ruined. Instead of standard apartment painted white, it’s turning almost a rust color, and literally dripping big rust-colored water droplets onto the beige carpeting. Because it is dripping water, it’s starting to sag. I’ve moved out a bookshelf, my electronics, and a dresser, but my bed, desk, and a second dresser are still being held hostage in the room, unable to be moved out due to the positioning of the giant carpet-drying fans. I’ll be camping out at my boyfriend’s apartment for the night, but regardless of whether or not the ceiling collapses in my room, it will have to be completely ripped out and replaced, which will take quite a lot of work, and thus I will be homeless for quite some time and am not quite sure where I will be able to stay during the week. I’ll go back tomorrow evening to survey the damage, and if the ceiling has not yet collapsed, try to move anything else out of my room and into our living room, which is now cluttered with my belongings. I’m pretty nervous about the return however, and the potential damage to everything I own, which of course is not covered by the apartment.

So, um, if you happen to know anyone with a spare couch/room in the D.C. area who is willing to take in a quiet, neat, friendly, and unexpectedly homeless graduate student for a few weeks, or um, would like to make any furniture donations if mine is crushed under a collapsed ceiling and bathtub because I can’t afford to buy more off of my meager stipend, err, um, let me know. Oh, and if you’d like to write my pharmacology and/or epidemiology papers that would be swell, because right now I’m finding myself just a bit unable to focus on things other than my pending homelessness, forcing me to succumb to every graduate student’s worst nightmare – literally moving into the lab.

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).