Jan 12, 2010

Happy New Year!

Where have I been you ask? Well, after my last entry, we successfully started preparing brain slice cultures, and even imaged some on a confocal microscope. This was really a miracle of circumstance, as a colleague happened to have extra mice pups delivered unexpectedly, which would be sacrificed without purpose unless we needed them. They were to be the appropriate age within a week of my lab tech (who I will call J for the purposes of this blog) starting, and we had nothing set up yet, let alone all the reagents required for the experiment. But, somehow J managed to pull everything together and we were actually slicing by early the following week. Then, it turned out we were having a demo for confocal scopes in our building, so we were actually able to bring our freshly prepared slices and look at them on confocal - all within 1.5 weeks of J starting at the lab! Since then we had fortune to have another batch of mice prior to Xmas and made better cultures on this second round. Unfortunately, the cultures still died, but we think we are using too much media on top of the slices and impairing oxygen diffusion. Soon we should have our own mice so we are less dependent on others for sources.

After a week of call at the end of November, I had some "fun" submitting my PrioNet recruitment grant. There was a lot of last minute confusion regarding who had to sign what, and on the day everything was to be couriered to the agency, the final office at U of A, which was supposed to sign off, told me they had received the grant but because there was no sticky note on it saying urgent, they didn't take it seriously... I will refrain from articulating my exact response to this, but let us just say it was the straw that broke the camel's back (my back). The good news is that the agency allowed an extra day for things to get sent. The bad news is that my sanity was damaged for a while... In the future I will invest heavily in sticky notes to ensure communication happens. See? Even within the "science machine" communication breaks down! "A sticky note, a sticky note, my kingdom for a sticky note!"

But, I had a great break for 7 days over Xmas, including some skiing and relaxing in Banff with my husband. After catching up on sleep and sanity, it was back on call on the 31st through to the 7th. So much for sleep catch-up; the last three days straight were very busy. The next day we had a huge NSERC funding agency visit, where we had to demonstrate the quality of the Prion Centre and convince them of our need for funding as a national resource. It was a long day, and I drank a lot of coffee, but it went relatively well. We won't know the results for a while though. In the mean time, the push is on to get the containment part of the Centre up and running - which is currently caught up in paperwork delays...

Anyway, I really should write up this neurology clinical skills test station, prepare my year-end PrioNet report (even though it has only been 9 months since funding was given!) and review this article by the end of the week.

Oh - one more piece of good news. I had my year end evaluation with the Chair of Medicine, and it sounds like they are going to keep me - for the time being at least... ;)