a stupid thing to do

This year my list of stupid things I have done has lengthened substantially. It probably started with my 80 mile bike ride with my roommate the day before finals for Spring Quarter where we did not bring a bike repair kit (and as a result I got a flat tire). Then of course there was the continued running after my vaccinations to the point where it was painful to walk. Today however, my stupidity rose to a new level. In a desperate attempt to save the rest of my fish, they are now being treated with nitrofurasone (a scary antibiotic) and formalin (to kill any protozoans) and each tank is on a UV sterilizer courtesy of Dennis. Since the antibiotic is killing my biological filter, I am having to do frequent water changes again so this morning I was going through the water change and everything was going really well until I went to add formalin to raise the concentration to therapeutic levels (every time I do a water change now I have to calculate how much water I removed and add the appropriate amount of medications to the water I put in). Anyway, the formalin is at a very low concentration so I was trying to get an accurate measurement and there was an air bubble in the syringe I was using to draw up the medication. I tried tapping the syringe and the bubble didn't budge so I did something I have done thousands of times before as the tried-and-true method of releasing bubbles from syringes: flicking the syringe. Well, there happened to be a small amount of formalin on the outside of the syringe and when I flicked the syringe the air bubble rose gracefully to the top of the syringe but some of the formalin on the outside of the syringe spashed into my eye. To make matters worse, this particular medicine is 37% foraldehyde, 10-13% methanol and the rest is an inert aqueous solution. Approximtely two seconds after the flicking, my left eye started to burn. To give you an idea, this particular mixture of formaldehyde and methanol has an OSHA health rating and contact rating of 3 (severe). According to the bottle, a spash usually causes blindness. Formaldehyde of course is a suspected carcinogen as well so things were not looking good. After I screamed for my supervisor, Pete, I was whisked away to an eye wash station (never mind that this station is connected to the same water that is likely poisoning my fish) I flushed my eyes for about 5 minutes (that whole 15 minute thing seems really long when your eyes are burning) and then was rushed to the emergency room. While my eyes were being flushed, the burning was so intense that I was gasping for air. If I thought the 5 minute flush at Hatfield was bad, I was in for a treat at the emergency room. I was hooked up to a wonderfully painful apparatus that flushed a steady stream of saline into my eye for over half an hour. They took the pH of my eye afterwards and it was still too basic so they had to reinsert the apparatus and flush again. I think my eye was starting to hurt as much from the flushing apparatus as from the formaldehyde. Finally, my pH was close enough to normal and I got the pleasure of going through an eye exam. Fortunately, I still have 20-20 vision and there are no abrasions on my eye. I keep closing my good eye and checking, though, because I am super worried I will wake up tomorrow and be blind in one eye.
Besides the scary contraption, the emergency room visit wasn't all that bad, though. My wonderful supervisor Pete sat patiently through the whole ordeal entertaining me and asking the nurses what if they would give me more saline to prolong the embarassing and painful situation I was in. The doctor was pretty cool, too. He quickly realized I was a geek and told me all sorts of cool stories about strange cases he had seen throughout his career and gave me the product information sheets for all the drugs I received so could read them tonight. Thanks to the other person helping with my eye flushing, the entire staff of Hatfield quickly knew about my accident and the story got embellished to the point where I pointed the syringe toward my eye and squirted the entire contents into my eye and there was some debate as to whether I got formalin or nitrofurasone or both into my eye. I think I spent a good portion of my day explaining what happened to people.
I spent the rest of the day at work, despite Pete's protests. I finished taking care of my fish and saw a seminar entitled: "snailfishes: why?" by the world expert on snailfishes. Where else can you eat cookies and drink tea and listen for an hour on someone's expeditions in the sub-artic searching for snailfishes? I love Hatifield :)

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 :)

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.