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Monday, January 03, 2005
Of mice and medicine Well, I'm gonna go get studied. Tonight I'm going to the Jefferson University Hospital sleep lab to get hooked up to machines and somehow have a typical night's sleep, which seems highly dubious. I mean, I have a hard enough time getting to sleep in my own bed in my own house without any wires attached. And I really, really don't like the idea of people watching me while I sleep. Humph. Then again, if I have a hard time getting to sleep or staying asleep tonight, I guess it'll prove the point. I certainly didn't sleep well last night, mostly because I was filled with anxiety; I woke up at 6:30, unaccustomedly early, with my heart pounding so hard I could hear it: THUMP-thu-THUMP-thu-THUMP-thu-THUMP. I am so not looking forward to this. (I posted about not looking forward to the initial evaluation back on December 14th.) I was also anxious about coming back to work after over a week off—not because of any actual work, but because I was afraid Bad Things might have happened. One of my coworkers was literally deathly ill in December (he has muscular dystrophy and he got a respiratory ailment that turned into pneumonia, which is especially dangerous for people with MD), and the updates my boss was getting from his mother, who was pretty much living at the hospital and hardly sleeping, had been sporadic and unpromising. The first thing I did when I got in this morning was check my office e-mail; and, thank God/gods/heaven, he's doing much better, is out of the hospital, and is going to work from home for a few weeks and come back to Philly when he's fully recovered. Whew. On a less important but proportionately anxiety-inducing level, I was also hoping the office mice hadn't started dying or eating each other (yes, someone was supposed to feed them, but what if he hadn't?—and yes, I could've gone to the office and checked, but, well, I didn't; so if they'd been dead and cannibalistic I'd've felt even worse about it). So the second thing I did this morning was check the mouse cage, and once again had anxiety allayed as I discovered they're all alive. Or at least there aren't any dead ones in the cage; I'll do a head count when I clean the cage later today. Um, a head-attached-to-a-body count. A head-attached-to-a-living-body count. And, as much as I hope there aren't fewer of them, I really hope there aren't more of them. I've tried to keep the males away from the females, but as I've posted before, it's very hard to determine the genders of spiny mice, and you never know when you're going to discover that your supposedly same-sex cage has produced a litter of little inbred mouse babies. Argh, increasingly long entry here. I'd better get it posted so I can get back in the swing of blogging things, and so I can get a 2005 archive started. Oh, yeah, and do more work; the kind they pay me for. Right. Well, Happy Julian-Calendar New Year, everyone; let's get this party started. [ at 12:46 PM • by Abby • permalink • ] |
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