Safe in a Crazy World …

This is another sh** period of time for me. I am doing a project which determines whether I can graduate after 4 years of brain damage. And it seems that I cannot communicate well with my boss, and to make it worse, we have different thinking on certain steps of the project.

I got scolded today because I did not get enough cells in time to grow for a certain step of the experiment. And bcos I feel that there is another method to get around this problem, I felt that I should let the cells grow before proceeding, rather than proceed to the next step and not get any useful information on the results due to low cell count. When I asked boss, he was so angry probably bcos he is stressed over not getting substantial results for my thesis. But you can’t change reality - that research projects usually take years to complete, what’s more I have only 3 months!!

We are not required to produce outstanding results, but most importantly to analyze any results or even mistakes, and gain insight into how we should approach the experiment or troubleshoot any problems faced. Mistakes actually give us more information on a step or even our target cell or protein! It is very common for a project thesis to contain no results, but only troubleshooting of problems faced, due to the time frame given. These are useful information which could guide future experiments, and the school accepts them in the thesis because that is the reality of research! You might well get stuck on a particular step for months, and it could be just a step which helps you isolate the cells or protein etc you need to even START your project. Apparently my boss thinks that we must get some results significant enough for the school to see, and bcos he was the one who gave me the project, I don’t think that I have the right to argue with him.

I don’t mind going back to lab 7 days a week, never mind that I don’t have time for myself. But I just hope that he could understand the intensity of brain exertion and labour that I have to put in on all the procedures. I wish he could try it out himself and not forget that I am only human. Everything is so multi-factorial that just thinking of them makes my brain experience a mental block. Sometimes I would hang like a computer and I would ’stone’ to regain what I had been thinking earlier on. Different groups of cells have different factors, different time to process, different things to add etc. I feel like a robot having to remember complex things and the smallest details, besides not having enough rest and NO LIFE.

Everyday is a war. Once an experiment starts, I have to make sure everything is ready, if not, even a few days of work can go to waste. This makes me think of experimental steps even while having dinner. And when I realized that I had forgotten to coat some 96-well plates for tomorrow, I almost fainted. Which means I had better go to lab 1-2 hours earlier to coat them tomorrow morning. If tomorrow’s operation goes wrong, I wouldn’t want to think what might happen to me. Just bcos of the limited time frame given, I am working much more intensely than even the lab staff, sigh … think my brain is going bonkus anytime soon …

Ok, I shall have to get going after all the complaining … sorry that you had to read this haha … 

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