[ Living In The Fairytale ]

Monday, December 05, 2005

Bad start to BS901?

Today I went to my supervisor's office at the early hour of 9 am to find that I was the first one there and the supervisor had yet to come in. This gave me quite a shock because Dr Thiru's lab in comparison would be buzzing with activity at 9 already.

The supervisor came in at 9.15 but had to rush off for a meeting till 10.30, so I was stuck with reading a 10-page research review on calcium signalling. I read for one hour and I couldn't finish it! Guess my brain has decided to go on holiday already (the fact that I misread things quite often now is a niggling sign). It was quite embarrassing when I couldn't answer the question, "what is the role of calcium in heart contraction?" and when I couldn't identify the position of the heart valve. Looks like I've got some reading up to do. =(

What came after that was pretty traumatising. We followed the supervisor to the animal house and watched him dissect out the heart from the rabbit. Ordinarily, the rabbit would have been gassed to death with carbon dioxide and the procedure would have been clean and quick. The rabbit he used today was still alive when its throat was slit to let out the blood and thus it struggled and its blood splattered all over the floor. I was just simply grasping my neck, rooted to the ground while Agnes bravely cleaned up the blood. After the blood was drained we thought it would surely be dead, but it jerked each time its skin was cut. (With the supervisor exclaiming, "S***! Oh f***!")When the ribcage was cut, it suddenly jumped and the large intestine fell out, onto the supervisor's pants! There was literally feces all over the floor and also on his pants (haha). Yucks. At least now I know I should not involve myself in animal work; I don't think I can bring myself to kill an animal.

The subsequent myograph experiments on the heart valve failed. Apparently the heart valve died before we could get any reading. What a waste of a rabbit's life. I hope we don't have to sacrifice too many to get our results, because each day of experiments requires a fresh heart valve and already, they'd sacrificed 4 rabbits last week.

In The Fairyland On|9:08 PM|