Sniffing Isofluorane, needle pricks, and complimenting EMTs

Monday was HECK-TIK!

To give a quick summary of my work day, I had two different irradiation experiments and one of which had to be followed up with time point collections at 4 and 12 hours post exposure. I know that has no real meaning to anyone who doesn't know my work, but I don't want to get in trouble with revealing too much. Just know it was a lot of work because think about it: if I irradiate my specimen around noon, 4 hours later is in the middle of the afternoon and 12 hours later is in the middle of the night. Late night timed collections after running around an ex-military base is exhausting and the amount of prepping required is immense. The guy in charge yelled at us, "This is a $XXXX beam and you're just going to let it lag?!?" Well, I believe that was during my collaborators' run, not mine (I hope. Ha.)

So the 4-hour time point didn't go well. What should have taken us about 30 mins ended taking longer than an hour. I freaked out, like PMS level freak out, over-react, on the verge of tears kind of freak out. (The importance of the 30 mins time frame is because the protein expression of the specimen can change and that would skew the data.)

After the freak out, I decided to practice on the control specimen to see what can be done to cut back on the time. This was around 9 pm. Around 10 pm I had another freak out moment: I pricked myself with a contaminated needle.

I ended up calling the emergency extension. The ambulance and cops came. They checked my heart rate, blood pressure, filled out some paper work... I was fine, but it was my first time hurting myself on the job. On top of that, I had all this pent up frustration with colleagues back home and stress that accumulated to this explosive day. I ended up over-working myself and nearly put myself in a dangerous situation. Let's face it, no matter how expensive this project is, it is not more valuable than my life and well-being. Important lesson in the science/reseatch field learned.

Now imagine this: the following day some news surfaced that basically meant the more important project is wasted. You know what was my reaction? Nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. I emailed my superiors back on the west coast to fill them in just in case the bosses in charge of both teams had not discussed the issue. I was a bit worried, but nothing can be done to fix what happened. My run had already been completed; I can't redo it. I just hope all this hard work wasn't for nothing.

Now I feel like I owe you readers an explanation of the title. "Sniffing isofluorane" -- Isofluorane is an anesthetic and I was stupid enough to sniff it. I thought there was something funny going on with the isoflo machine. "Needle prick" -- See above paragraphs. "Complimenting EMTs"-- the EMTs saw my arm tattoo while taking my blood pressure and caught a glimpse of some of my other body art. As I left, they gave me a compliment. Yeah, I saved the best for last.