Well. . . Here I am in the lab at 11:30 PM. Neat. It's been one of those days. Everything went well. Then due to tangled cables, everything went badly. After that was fixed, everything was fine again. Then my hand slipped, and it all went to crap. And then there was recovery. And things improved. Unfortunately, improvement didn't happen until about 5:30 PM. So, there was the 3 hour experiment, followed by rinsing and perfusion that is still going.
All that said, I've got a damaged experiment that barely worked, and I'm here at 11:30, waiting, until at least midnight, maybe one.
And I still want to do this for a living. I don't know what that says about me. I'm simultaneously tired and caffeinated.
I really wanted to give up and go home after damaging the spinal cord. Somehow, I was convinced to give it a chance to recover and maybe get a decent motor pattern. I could only get one clean form of scratch and no swimming. I actually need the swimming example. And I had a really nice one pre-slippage. But I take what I can get. It's days like this that it's so tempting to cut corners. Like right now, I want to cut this perfusion short by about 150mL just to go home a little sooner. But I know that going off protocol for one experiment, even just a little, is a big deal. And it's worth the extra 15 minutes (or 4 hours) to have usable data.
But I still want to go home.
Until then, I'll just keep catching up on podcasts.
Peace.
3 comments:
Good girl, to stay on protocol! :)
Doing that sometimes cost me an extra day (bleh) but it's definitely worth it so you can use the data.
Fight on!
I am feeling your pain.
Be strong, Katie. Feel the blood of your ancestors coursing through your veins, the wild vigour of the Teutons that brought Kiev to its scabby knees...
Good luck
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