Dear Lab Life...

Oops, so clearly I'm starting to slack off with this blogging thing. Just one of the many things I seem to not be getting done now that I'm working in the lab. 3 weeks in and I can already feel my life slowly slipping away. I guess that's when you know you're properly researching. I don't want to be so ignorant as to compare it to being a doctor starting out as a medical intern (I'm going through a major Grey's Anatomy stage at the moment, sorry) as I know that's definitely a lot tougher, but when 9 hours is the average amount of time you spend in the lab every day and you start thinking 7pm is the normal time to head home, then I feel I have some right to say that medical research is fairly intense- and I haven't even started working with the parasite yet!

I won't bore you with the details of my day to day life, but I will say that there are two kinds of days in the lab...

Office days, when I spend the day sitting in the shared office space, reading journal articles, making flow charts, drinking ridiculous amounts of coffee, and continually checking facebook.

... And lab days, when I hang out in the lab the whole time, growing cells, running assays, watching mice being murdered, doing copious amounts of pipetting, watching FACS analyses run for hours, and being aware of every second that exists in a 5 minute timeframe whilst cells are being centrifuged. You will never be more aware of how long 5 minutes can last than when you're waiting for a centrifuge to run.

Reason #218 why I shouldn't be left alone in the lab

Now I wouldn't say medical research is particularly difficult. It's not rocket science and it's not saving lives (well what you're doing could potentially save lives down the track... but you get what I mean). Pipetting and balancing a centrifuge is not that hard, but what's a bit more tricky is understanding why you're running this particular assay, how this relates to a bigger picture of the immune system, and what greater things can come from this (the answer is always 'a potential cancer vaccine', I swear). And studying immunology papers is no case of light reading- it takes a lot of concentration to actually take in and process all those words and ideas your eyes are presenting to you. Yet every day I look forward to going into the lab (crazy, I know).

Hours spent pipetting definitely isn't everyone's cup of tea, and to be honest, it doesn't even sound that fun to me, but for some reason I enjoy it. Yes it sucks working Good Friday, Good Monday, and being told that "oh yeah, by the way, you'll need to come in this Saturday and Sunday to sort and infect cells for a couple of hours", but I still like it. I'm not sure why this is, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility that I simply just really enjoy pretending to be a scientist. On Monday I was left alone in the lab for most of the day for the first time, and even though I wouldn't necessarily classify it as 'fun', I really enjoyed hooking my laptop up to the speakers in the lab and blaring Josh Pyke and Lykke Li while I washed bone marrow out of mice femurs.

But maybe what I really like best is wearing my MTC (mikrobiologi, tumör- och cellbiologi) department ID card all day and swiping and coding my way into the entry-restricted labs. Entry cards make me feel super special, and seriously, there's nothing I love more than feeling special.

Too excited about getting my entry ID card after a week of jumping through admin loops