the fortune cookie

Dennis gave me a fortune cookie from his lunch today and the fotune said "more effort and hard work is required to make a precious dream come true". So now even fortune cookies are asking me to work harder :) I laughed for a long time when I read the message. Things are stable here again as far as fish. I haven't had any more die since last Friday and I should get the histopathology report tomorrow and hopefully know why I lost an entire tank. My cousin Caroline is coming to visit Oregon tonight and I am going to kidnap her for the weekend and show her the aquarium and Hatfield and other quirks of Newtown such as Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum and the Wax Museum. I am so excited to see her!
A strange thing has been happening this week, though. I didn't run at all a week before my yellow fever/rabies vaccine but I was biking pretty much every day. I biked for a long time on Friday after finally getting back from my errands across Western Oregon then felt sick on Saturday so I didn't do anything. On Sunday, I went for a pretty long run that included a huge hill, but it wasn't any more difficult than other runs I have been doing this summer. I was really sore that evening and the next day--so much so that I had trouble walking because every step hurt so much--which was strange since I usually don't get very sore, even when I overexert myself. The next day, I was mad at myself for being sore so I ran the same route without the hill (making it 1.5 miles shorter and completely flat) thinking that warming up my muscles on something easy would be good for them. However, I was even more sore the next day. It's kind of scary--I have to use my arms to get out of chairs because my legs can't hold the weight. I didn't do anything yesterday then today I was still as sore as I was after my second run but I decided to run a flat course at lunch anyway. Then this afternoon I was just walking at the marina and fell because my leg basically collapsed from under me. So, I am getting pretty worried about what is going on and I wanted to know if anyone had any thoughts on it. I know I should probably stop running until it gets better and I am going to the doctor again for a booster of the rabies vaccination so I can ask the nurse then, but I have never been this sore/stiff in my life and I can't think of anything really strenuous I did to bring it on. I am kind of wondering if it has something to do with the vaccinations I got last Friday, but I don't know. Hmmm.....

the day from hell

So three days ago, fish in one of my tanks didn't eat. I didn't think too much of it and Tim didn't think it was a big deal, either. However, late that night when I came in to check on them, a couple had died. That was weird, but it was close to midnight so I couldn't exactly call Tim or Pete (especially because I didn't want to admit to them that I was in there checking on the fish that late). I necropsied the ones that died and found white granulomas (spots) on their liver and spleen, characteristic of mycobateriosis (the same bacteria that causes tuberculosis in humans). Even more scary. But mycobacteriosis is a chronic disease so I checked my water quality and went to sleep. The next morning, I came in to change water in the tanks quickly before rounds at the aquarium and...only two fish were left alive in the tank. Of course, they had to die on the day I had rounds that couldn't be rescheduled and the day that someone was coming to pick me up all the way from Dallas to take me home so I could drive another hour to get vaccinated for Ecuador and return to the coast. It was five minutes to 8am, rounds started at 8, and she was coming at 10. I quickly removed the fish, placed them in a cooler so to slow down the decomposition process, jotted down some quick notes for Dennis and Pete and ran over to the aquarium. I finished with rounds around 9:30 and returned to Hatfield to find Dennis and Pete arguing over a dead fish--the two that were left alive this morning had died, too. I tried to perform quick necropsies on the fish and on almost all of them found the characteristic white granulomas. I didn't get it though, this was one accute disease, and it didn't mesh with the mycobacteriosis theory. I checked and re-checked my water quality and it continued to be fine. My friend showed up to take me home right on time so I had to ask her to drive me to the local vet clinic to get formalin to package the fish and send them to the veterinary diagnostic lab at OSU for a histopathology. She was really nice about it, but the clinic's mail had already gone out so we had to drive to the post office, too. Unfortunately, the post office refused to take the package because my kidney cultures were taped in an envelope on the outside of the box containing the fish and they didn't have any materials to repackage them with. I was so frustrated at this point, I just left the post office and decided to figure out how to send the package later. My friend drove me straight home so I could make the mail in McMinnville but on the way I decided that it might just be easier to drop off the package at the lab myself since it was kind of on the way back to the coast. Our plans for a leisurely lunch ruined, I made her a quick peanut butter and jelly sandwidch at home and left for Salem to get vaccinated. When I was finally seen by the nurse (after waiting half an hour) she informed me that they yellow fever vaccine I was about to receive was a live virus and would make me very ill over the weekend. Grrr. On top of that, the rabies vaccine I was also receiving often made people ill. The one good thing about the whole day was that I finally made it to the diagnostic lab before they closed and dropped off the samples before heading back to the coast.
Fortunately, none of the fish in the other tanks have died yet. I am feeding them antibiotics in their food and waiting to hear back from the histopathology report on what killed the other fish. I was pretty sick on Saturday, but not nearly as bad as the nurse made it sound like I would be, so I guess that is a plus. It just seems like no matter what I do I cannot keep the clownfish alive. I just keep hoping that the histopathology will come back with a definitive cause of death so I know what happened.
I guess this is just one of the many joys of doing research with live animals :)

Emergence at last!

For the past several days, I have spent evenings after work locked in a house with two dogs and two cats a block from one of the most beautiful beaches on the coast (with the bonus of having incredible tide pools). Grrr. It is all because I had to do a ton of research on the physiological stress response in fish for Tim. Don't get me wrong: I am probably one of the few people who find the topic "physiological stress response" fascinating, but I discovered shortly after I began my research that this response is a lot more complicated than it appears. After reading a few articles, my head was spinning with so many acronyms that I couldn't keep track of half of them. So, I got the great idea to make a diagram explaining the many feedback mechanisms involved. Two days and over 10 hours of work later, I had developed what I think is a pretty amazing diagram for only being able to use microsoft word. I think I will go tidepooling for a little bit with two stir-crazy cockerspaniels before doing a little more research on syngnathids.
Click the empty blue box at the top of the post if you want to see the diagram...and you know you want to see it ;)

some explanation:

I worked all by myself today and it was pretty invigorating to realize that I was actually capable of getting everything done. We have several medical cases that need treatment at the science center and all the warm marine fish needed a serious water change. I woke up feeling very overwhelmed by all the stuff I had to get done today, especially since I wasn't going to get any help, but in the end I just felt much more empowered as I kept crossing things off my to-do list.
My mom came to visit me this evening and we went for a long walk on the beach before eating dinner at this very cool, hippie place where everything (including the kitchen) is outside and there is a playground of old ropes and barrels for kids and they have live music in the form of an old man playing a song on the guitar every now and then. I walked barefoot on the way to the beach and on the sand and now my feet are really sore from all the gravel on the way there :(

ready for a long one...

Early one Monday morning, almost four weeks ago now, I moved into my apartment for the summer, and the next evening I evacuated along with everyone else living at Hatfield thanks to a tsunami warning. There are so many tsunami evacuation route signs in Newport that you can’t actually tell where they are telling you to go so my roommates and I decided to drive to Toledo, a tiny town 7 miles inland, and hang out at a dairy queen until the warning passed. Apparently, everyone else who didn’t know much about tsunamis had the same idea. Unfortunately, the dairy queen is the only place that sells food in Toledo, and it was closed. So a good portion of the population of Newport would pull into the Dairy Queen parking lot, pull on the door, realize it was closed and go back and sit in their cars; luring more people to the ice cream shop. Turns out the assigned evacuation route for Hatfield is actually about 100 yards inland at a ‘point’ aka the parking lot of a local hotel. Well, I guess I will know for next time. In the mean time, my mom has completely freaked out about me being washed to sea in a tsunami. Now I realize that I am hard to reach at the coast—up until two days ago I had no phone and now my phone has no answering machine and I am rarely home to answer it (let alone update my blog ;)—but it is much more likely that since Newport decided not to purchase tsunami warning sirens I will be walking on the beach completely unaware of the impending wave. Personally, I would rather die naive watching the sunset on the rocky shore than pedaling as fast as I can on my bicycle down the highway that parallels the coast.
Alright, back to my internship :) I struggled for a long time this school year with the decision of whether or not to return to Hatfield this summer. I finally decided that out of all my other options, it offered the best opportunity to experience first-hand aquatic research and veterinary medicine. However, I questioned that decision a lot the first couple of weeks because sometimes it seems like an easy way out of the tumultuous beginnings of experiencing something completely new.

About that blond-haired best friend…

I have this best friend who used to be my roommate. We should have been roommates this year, but I decided to live in an on-campus house and she decided to be an RA; a mistake for both of us. She is the most amazing person I have ever met. She generously mentors elementary kids while at school and is so committed to it that her mentees come before her schoolwork sometimes :). We play music together and I always feel so much more comfortable playing the piano when I can hear her cello next to me. But possibly my favorite thing to do with her is going on really long walks around town late at night. We just talk and walk and completely lose track of time: once, I think we walked for over four hours. I had to say goodbye to her yesterday knowing that it would be the last time I saw her for almost a year since we are both studying abroad in different countries next year. I am going to miss her so much.
Saying godbye to her made yesterday even worse. It was over 90 degrees in Kalamazoo and very humid. I had to pack all my stuff and fit it into a very small locker on campus. Then I had to say goodbye to people who have really become my family. While I am certainly excited to see my 'real' family again and spend time with my mom and brother and dog, we have a completely different relationship now that I spend over half the year away. It is really my friends at school who are my support system when life becomes overwhelming. I don't know what I am going to do without them.

It's officially summer!!!

I just finished my last exam for the quarter...cell biology (yuk). Actually, it was the best cell exam I have ever taken. I knew all the pathways and all the definitions and could answer all the questions with sufficient wordiness to finally please (I hope) my human-focused professor (it helped that I actually studied for this one, if only for a few hours). Anyway, now I get to eat pizza and drink beer and listen to a lecture about sea turtles from the chair of the bio department then go bowling with the chem department and finally, one last building blocks celelbration. I guess somewhere in there I will pack :)
Keep an eye out on the news because thanks to my awesome classes this year I am smuggling a live fish and a preserved shark embryo on the plane with me. I have come up with some elaborate plans to avoid capture, ranging from swallowing the fish in a plastic bag to storing him in my water bottle (the latter seems slightly more palatable), but hopefully he will arrive home safely. Mom: don't forget to have a tank waiting for him with 24-hour old water :) I almost conned my professor into giving me a chick to take home that I could raise into a chicken, but once he found out it would have to fly with me to Oregon, he refused. Dang it.