What happens in Vegas... happens without me

At this precise point in time, I should be somewhere flying over the mid-west, en route to Fabulous Las Vegas.
Instead, I am lying flat on my back on my couch in my apartment. DAMN YOU, CENTIPEDE!

Needless to say, I am totally bummed. I have been looking forward to this trip all summer. If anyone happens to actually be able to walk out their front door and finds themselves in Vegas, you are certainly welcome to my Saturday night tickets to Blue Man Group or Sunday night tickets to Cirque du Soleil's Zumanity, as clearly I will not be using either.
Truthfully, I shouldn't be complaining (but that won't stop be from being bitter about missing my trip and losing out on a lot of money on the hotel room, show tickets, etc.) as I am at least able to hobble around bent over, which sure beats crawling on my elbows as a means of transportation. My mother came down to D.C. to help out, and brought her supply of vicodin and percoset from her rotator cuff surgery, which has certainly helped with the pain (since I was unable to skateboard myself down to student health). I am almost acting my age again -- I can actually use the toilet, and I slept on the couch and not the floor last night!
For the first time in ages, I wish I was in the lab. This has been the worst "sick week" ever, since I am mostly immobile, in tons of pain, and not able to sit up to watch TV. Of course, that's not saying much for the lab when it is just one step up from full-body debilitation.

"Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!"

The past 24 hours have been the most unbearable, excruciating 24 hours that I can recall in my entire life. Yesterday morning, while jumping around wildly swinging a shoe attempting to kill a centipede on my ceiling, I managed to pull a muscle wrapped around a nerve in my lower back. I have never experienced such intense pain in my life – immediately as it happened, I crumpled to the ground, writing and screaming in pain. A day later, I am still unable to get off the floor, stuck in the middle of my living room lying on my back, staring at the ceiling and wishing it would just cave in on me and put me out of my misery. I am completely unable to sit up, get my knees under me, stand, move to the couch, or do anything which one is required to do in daily life. Since my fiancé is currently in Philadelphia on an away rotation, I am stuck here on my own. Thankfully, a friend of mine came over yesterday to fetch the Aleve that was in the bathroom cabinet, totally out of my reach, and bring the heating pad, a few blankets, a pillow, my laptop, the remote for the TV, etc., so that I at least don’t die of boredom while I lie here and wait to atrophy. It took me 2 hours just to wiggle on my elbows from the living room to the front door, and to stretch up in excruciating pain to unlock the door to let her in (mind you, I live in a 750 square foot 1 bedroom apartment, so it is about 15 steps from the living room to the front door). Now, on top of everything else, I have such bad rug burn on my elbows, that they are bleeding all over the white carpet every time I try to move!

I am certain it is just a pulled muscle and nothing more serious, as I have complete function in my legs and no numbness whatsoever, just one hell of a pain in my lower back whenever my back moves (and half the time still when it is totally still). Because nearly overdosing on Aleve has done nothing but start to give me an ulcer, my fiancé suggested that I contact student health and see if they would prescribe something over the phone and then I could find a friend to pick up the prescription for me.

As we all know, I loathe student health. I have yet to make it through a visit without being forced to pee in a cup, despite the fact that half my visits to student health are because of problems with ovarian cysts and I couldn’t get pregnant now even if I wanted to do so. I am quite sure that if I make it in for a visit today, they will assume that my back pain is related to pregnancy and send me on my merry way with a bottle of folic acid vitamins.

Last night, I sucked it up and called the student health doctor-on-call pager number. Seven times later, I still hadn’t received a call back. I attempted to sleep on my back, but every time I would try to roll over, I woke up with unbearable pain shooting through my back. As soon as student health opened, I called and asked for a doctor to call me back. This is the conversation that resulted:

Nurse Practitioner: What seems to be the problem?
Julie: I pulled a muscle in my back, and I am incapable of sitting up or moving. I have been
laying on the floor since yesterday morning.
NP: And you are by yourself? You poor thing! You need to get up and walk around to help the
pain.
J: I CAN’T get up. I can’t even sit up. If I try, I get a muscle spasm that pulls me right back
down and leaves me with intense pain.
NP: You need to come in for an appointment, how about 1pm today?
J: I can’t move. I can’t get to student health.
NP: Take a taxi.
J: I can’t move. I can’t get to a taxi.
NP: Just pull your knees under you and stand.
J, attempting: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
NP: Oh dear. You need to come in for an appointment.
J: I am not currently capable. Maybe I will feel better in a few days and I can make it in then.
NP: No, you should come in sooner.
J: The only way I can leave this apartment is on a stretcher.
NP: No, you don’t want to call for an ambulance. If it is just a pulled muscle, the hospital will
take X-rays, not find anything, and send you home. You just need to come to student health
for an evaluation and we can prescribe you pain medicine. I will see you at 1pm.

Needless to say, there is no way I am going to be able to make it out of the apartment by 1pm, considering it took me over an hour this morning just to put on a clean pair of underwear (don’t laugh until you try it, laying on your back, unable to lift your shoulders forward so you can’t use your arms, and can barely move your legs). The only foreseeable way I see of escaping my prison of an apartment is by duct taping myself to a skateboard and pulling myself forward with m arms. Anyone have a skateboard I can borrow for the morning?!

Vacation... all I ever wanted!

Being on vacation reminds me of what it feels like to be happy. Having spent so much time completely miserable in the lab, I had forgotten. The fun, relaxing part of my time away doesn't even start until tomorrow, but it has been blissful thus far. A bad day out of the lab is still significantly better than a good day in the laboratory.
Normally, after a week out of the lab, I would be itching to go back. I think right now I would be quite content with never returning. I'm not sure if this is a testament to the fact that I am drastically overworked and need a month to recover (I haven't taken any time off since 3 days at Thanksgiving -- I refuse to count my 2.5 weeks out of the lab over "winter break" as any sort of a break, since I was studying 12-14 hours/day, every single day, for comprehensive exams), or if it is a sign that I need to run far, far away from the lab and find something else to do with my life.
Thus far over my time away, I have moved to a new apartment (after 6 years of friendship, 4.5 years of dating, and 0.5 years of engagement, my fiance and I finally decided to get with the 21st century and move in together), moved all the excess furniture to his mother's house, cleared out the spare bedroom in his mother's house and converted it into his new room for his away rotations in Philadelphia for most of next year, cut off 11.5 inches of hair for Locks of Love (pictures to come) and have the shortest hair I have had since I was about 10 years old, attended a lovely engagement party thrown by my future mother-in-law, and celebrated my father's retirement from 36 years of running mass transit safety for the Department of Transportation.
Now, I am off to enjoy 4 days at my parent's best friend's lake house, where I will do nothing but sit on the deck and work my way through a case of beer and water ski (although preferably not in that order), followed by 4 days at my fiance's family's shore house in Margate, where I will do nothing but sit on the porch in a vodka gimlet-induced daze, walk miles and miles up and down the boardwalk, and watch other people lose their money in Atlantic City (I will not be participating in the money loosing process, as I have a very spontaneous, very exciting trip to Las Vegas coming up in August).

I think I would be very content to never return to a tissue culture hood again.

It's like Christmas!

It doesn't take much to make us happy around here. We have two new undergrads starting research, and today I dug out a timer for each of them, to which one squealed with glee, "It's just like Christmas!" A few hours later, I too was giddy with my new find in the lab....
Notice that my pipettes are now neatly hanging on the wall. For a year and a half I have been secretly wishing that someone with a pipette stand would quit/graduate/move to another lab so that I could take over the stand. I'm a very tidy individual, and having to throw my pipettes in a drawer just wasn't cutting it (although, mind you, the pipettes were always in the drawer in size order, so I always knew when someone else had been using my things). It turns out these velcro-to-the-wall pipette stands had been in the lab the whole time -- it's amazing what a little bit of cleaning can locate. And please, no making fun of my craptastic Finnpipettes. They are the worst pipettes ever. If you're in charge of pipette purchasing for a lab -- STAY FAR AWAY! I have to calibrate them every single week, and the p2 has to be calibrated every time I use it. They are awful. Now I'm just hoping that someone with the Eppendorf pipettes quits/graduates/moves to another lab so that I can snag myself some actual functional pipettes.

And since I was taking pictures and everyone likes to be nosey and see what goes on in the lives of other people.... a picture of my lab bench. Like I said, I'm a little on the tidy side (minus the 6 coomassie gels which have been waiting to be imaged for the past 2 weeks). And if you notice that everything on my bench is labeled with my name.... it's not that I can't share, it's just that things have a tendency of walking off in this lab, and it's easier to locate them if they have JULIE plastered on the side in blue tape.

Now, if you don't mind, I am going to go admire my new pipette stands a bit more, because after 12.5 hours in the lab, I don't think I can handle doing anything brain-requiring while I wait for my gel to finish running.

I Hate Lab, Episode #2943

Please excuse me while I have a breakdown.

I spent over 9 hours alone in the hood on Friday. I came into the lab a little before 6am to work on my protein purification (the latest tally: Protein 4, Julie 0 -- no matter how many/what type of tags I put on this protein, it WILL NOT PURIFY. It outsmarts every purification bead/column/etc. I am working with the two most stubborn, pain-in-the-ass proteins in all of cancer and I am not happy about it), settle down in the hood around 9am, and stay until a little after 6pm. That's right. The whole lab leaves to go out to lunch, and where am I? Oh right, the hood. PI is out of town so everyone else leaves rolls in after 10am and leaves by 4pm and where am I both before and after they come and go? Oh right, the hood. Seriously, by the end of the day, my ass was numb and my eyes were crossed from sitting there for so long. Have I mentioned that I don't even like cell culture to begin with (hence why my project leans towards biochemistry and medicinal chemistry)?
I should also mention that when my PI dumped all this cell culture on me, he said it would take "a couple of hours to complete." In my book, NINE HOURS is not a "couple." Nine hours is ridiculous, when I'm also working on protein purification and crosslinking projects, plus working with a mathematician on campus to generate a formula to help with the screening of our small molecular inhibitors. Nine hours in the hood to make drug dilutions, split drug stock cells, set up 96-well plates for MTT assays, multiple 12-well plates worth of soft agar studies, and take care of my stock flasks, all which require different drug dilutions. And I'm supposed to do this twice a week for the next month, providing the rest of the lab doesn't riot and stab me to death with pipette tips over the fact that I am basically blocking off entire use of one of the hoods two days a week. (In my PI's defense, I don't think he was being an ass and intentionally lying to get me to do all this work, I think he's just so far removed from bench work that he has NO CONCEPT of how long things actually take. This problem happens a lot. Which is why a 12 hour day for me is now the norm, instead of the exception. Remember that goal I had of not working more than two 12 hour days/week? Hahahahaha.)
5:45am this morning I come in to discover that my cells are almost all contaminated. Mind you, minus the fact that I am left handed which is a GIANT hindrance in cell culture hoods in this lab which are set up for right-handed use (I am always crossing my hand over my plates through my "sterile field" to reach for pipettes, the vortex, and so on), I am always very cautious and aware of what I am doing. I've only ever once, in two years of cell culture, had any sort of contamination, and it was from thawing out a new cell line which someone else had frozen, so chances are that the contamination occurred prior to freezing. We appear to be the only lab in this university that tests for mycoplasma on a bi-weekly basis (or ever, for that matter), and I've never ever had mycoplasma positive cells. Never any fungal infection, no bacterial infections of my passaged cell lines. Maybe this is a sign that asking your graduate students to do nine hours worth of cell culture (with the same cell lines, meaning that most of my cells had to be sitting out for a good 6 or so hours) really isn't a good plan. Maybe, by the time your ass is numb and you have a giant sized headache from staring into a microscope counting cells for 2 hours (because he doesn't believe in the accuracy of the coulter counter so I have to count all my cells by hand/eyeball with the good old hemocytometer which only takes 1342 times longer), you start to get a little sloppy despite your best intentions. Maybe, when you're getting in the lab before 6am, you start to get a little anxious to leave by 6pm, especially when you have to head out of town for a wedding. My reward for doing all the cell culture without complaining is that now I get to sit through an inevitable giant lecture from my PI when he comes in later today and starts poking around my incubator to look at my cells, about how I'm not careful enough and not responsible enough and all I'm doing is wasting money, etc etc.

And people wonder why I am perpetually in such a miserable mood. Blame the cells.