It's my fault

I am not proud of working with 50rats and having to kill at least 1 a day. Seriously

I am trying my best to be careful but somehow shit happens.

Today was the first day of 14 of chronic feeding. The very first session went wrong.

I was distracted and I accidentally caused the death of 1rat. Hmm... Somehow the rat choked on the liquid drug and yea....The rest is self explanatory. No need for details.

I am seriously traumatised by the whole damn incident. Imagine staring blankly at a dying animal. Hmm.... Bloody sinful... I didn't sign up for this.

The whole incident really dampens my confidence and morale for th whole project. Started off wel but somehow alot of mishaps along the way... Partially due to unforeseencircumstances... And also due to my negliance, short concentration span, carelessness. I need to wake up.

On one end, there is the ethical issue of working with rats. I feel sad and down whenever one dies. On the other hand, when each sample dies, I lose one valuable data source. It is really pressurizing. Got to be careful so as to not harm any animals by accidentally (which causes great guilt) and also got to be careful so that I do not shrink my sample size any smaller.

The whole incident is haunting me. Putting 16 live rats into one gas chamber at one go (as instructed) and having an animal suffocating due to your own negliance IS NOT EDUCATIONAL at all.

No wonder Matthew says that FYP are a waste of money.

And now I can truly understand why Chloe changed her diet preference.

This is a dark post.

Till the End of Oct

Hmm... Rock camp just over... It's the last rock camp that I will be attending. Oh my... Thinking back about the previous camps.... Ranging from flying chickens, to CB yuen talk, to lots of sentosa and blah blah blah. Definitely unforgettable memories. No doubt, climbing team is my second family. Ok. Stop emo-ing.

Anyway... Straight after climbing carnival, I had lab. Got to prepare samples and drugs for the rats the next day. Ended around evening time. Shagged.

And then..........................The next day... I struggled to wake up in the rainy morning and left yixiang's room hastily for lab at 830am...

Guess what time i ended. Holy crap................ 745pm..... Thats like nearly 12hours of lab. With 20min chicken rice alone break. I pipetted the most number of wells on a microplate in my entire 4years in NUS. Continuously for 1hour. Pipette until pump. microlitres of reagents.... Volume so minute that you dont even feel you are adding anything in. Crap. To make things worse... the aircon cold until I wanna sleep while pipetting.

And then...............................I got to run back and fro between Animal Holding Unit (AHU) and my lab. Multipe times. Not fun, I tell you....

And then............................ Luckily my lab supervisor is nice enough to help me deal with the blood drawing as I perform microplate reading. Otherwise... 12hours lab becomes 24hours lab....

BUT.......................at the end of the whole day...it was all worth while. Managed to obtain relatively good results and objectives of the last few weeks were met. So thats a consolation. *Pat Pat on the back.

then it was off to yixiang's room. Packed up and off in a jerky cab.

With the attained effective dose of 150mg/kg, I will start the phase two of my FYP. 3weeks of chronic feeding with the TCM. Which means 3weeks of school everyday. Including saturdays and sunday. =(

Now... it is back to Universe and Cell bio. And many many many projects... pls start ok?

End of Oct.... come come....

Stalled.

Dam sian.

The animal holding unit just told me that they are unable to hold the next batch of rats due to the lack of space.

so I might have to delay the second batch of experiments.

Which means, it will eat into the exams period. Really GG already. Just when I thought I planned everything nice nice... aRGH! !@#@$%^%&^*&(*&^%$@#$%

Please help me....

Two of my purchases for the month.