you gotta love research...

Sometimes I wonder how nurses become qualified to practice any kind of medicine at all. I deal with animals where you sometimes can't even feel a vein, let alone see it yet I manage to draw blood with decent success and even though I don't have the lisence required to give immunizaitons, I know how to give them and could recite a list of side effects about each one. A nurse however, gets to draw blood out of an arm where you can clearly see and feel a large vein and can tell the patient to stay still. Yet somehow a nurse has managed to miss my vein hitting a nerve in my arm (this happened a couple of years ago, but I am still bitter) and on Friday, my opinion of nurses certainly did not rise. The nurse I saw for my second rabies vaccination started by not being able to find the vaccination in the fridge. When I asked her about the muscle pains I have been having, she looked confused, then walked out of the room. Turns out she was consulting the product information included with every drug and called me in when she saw muscle pain as one of the side effects. "Yep, looks like it's a possible side effect" she said, with an air of finality. Well, I knew it was a side effect, but what I was wondering was if it was normal for it to be this painful. She had no idea. But she did offer the following brilliant tidbit of knowledge. "You know, I was talking with a doctor the other day and he told me that sometimes right around where you get the vaccine feels warm and that is because your body is making things to fight the vaccine and he said that is a good thing." I tried to smile back but I couldn't help but think: yeah, that warm feeling might be called inflamation because your body is increasing blood flow to the area so it can make antibodies for the killed virus you are about to inject into me more quickly. But that of course has nothing to do with the pain I am feeling in my legs. Grrr. She seemed much more concerned about the small bruise the last vaccination left on my arm. We are talking about a bruise about the size of the top of a thumbtack, but she thought it was a big deal and made a huge show about giving me the new vaccination a couple of millimeters underneath the bruise so it wouldn't hurt as much. It was all very silly. I felt pretty sick after this vaccination too, so I think it is the rabies that is making me sick as well as sore. So much for the triathlon that I was going to run this summer...it just happens to fall on the day after I have to get my third and final rabies vaccination.
As far as fish go, this week has not been good. Everything was stable until Friday afternoon when I was gone and they started dying again. By Sunday they were dying faster than I could finish necropsies on them and neither Tim nor I could figure out anything. As a last result, we came up with two crazy theories and decided to treat the remaining fish in each of the two tanks with one of the treatments to see if any helped. Pete suggested that there might be toxins in the fresh water we were using to lower the salinity so in one tank we started to raise the salinity again and get rid of the fresh water. I suggested that maybe there was something to the parasites we were seeing occasionally on the skin of the fish so we treated the other tank with formalin. This morning, a day after treatment, the formalin-treated fish were all still alive and every fish in the higher-salinity tank except two had died. We quickly placed the other two fish in a formalin bath and hoped for the best. As of 5:30pm today, we had not lost any more fish but at this point it is pointless for me to continue with the rest of my experiment because the fish are obviously really stressed out and there will be way too many confounding variables. So I really don't know what I am going to do to show that I accomplished something with the grant I was given. Something to think about tonight, I guess. So goes the joys of research :)