Two Tales of Irony

Alright. It's been over a week since my last post so I am definitely not keeping up with the twice a week goal I mentioned before. So I thought I'd tell two stories to make up for it. Last Thursday I spent the day in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU). It was a much more depressing experience than being in the OR. Mostly because the people there are the ones who need the most care, many of them are on multiple forms of life support. In particular, there was one patient who had been recently admitted after being hit in the head by a car. He had suffered serious brain damage, and had emergency surgery to remove half of his skull to relieve the pressure. His family showed up by midday to see him and to talk to the doctors. Around the time I left I heard they had decided to take him off of life support. This was a very different experience for me and I send my sympathies to the family. Boston Globe article of the story: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/07/17/man_still_in_mgh_following_car_crash/?page=1 Now that wasn't supposed to be one of the stories but I guess it is now. Now the real story, with irony. After observing rounds in the morning I went to the conference room to grab some pizza and listen to a speaker. Turns out she had come to talk about nausea and vomiting. So I ate my food I listened to all the different reasons someone might feel sick. And which medications help with which kinds. I wanted to ask her what I should take for pizza plus all this talk about vomit. But I didn't. I was concentrating on preventing things from leaving my mouth, words included. The second story, with less irony, is also somewhat of a lab update. So far I have isolated enough RNA to outweigh a dollar bill. No seriously it's a ton. (more like 0.9832 grams, but this is RNA) When it comes to RNA degradation is the enemy! I managed to isolate some RNA from pancreatic tumor samples and stored it in the freezer. Then I moved on to normal pancreatic samples. Just a little background here, the pancreas has the most RNases of any organ in the body. A RNase is something that degrades RNA. RNase=Bad! So as you might be able to tell, I have had a fun time isolating RNA from normal samples. So last week when I finally managed to get two samples one day and three the next, you can know how excited I was. Then after I presented this at Lab meeting I got a complement but also a, "we'll see how long they last in the freezer" I had assumed that they would last a long time since some of the samples were already from '05 or something. So low and behold, last week I took the samples out of the freezer to test them and they were all degraded. And that wasn't even the worst part. The worst part the "I told you so" I got from Dr. Thayer. OK I just re-read that and it sounds worse that it really is, but I said it would be ironic so I was just being dramatic. The truth is that is what science is all about. It is never perfect, especially the first time. I hope that post was good enough, becase its about to be over. I have to get back to work. Actually not really, Its almost 3 and I havent done anything at all important today