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Mar. 10th, 2003 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hnpccI keep having strange dreams about work.
Last night I dreamt I'd lost a bonded surgical needle (and thread, er der) somewhere in the bed and I had to find it before I stabbed myself.
Until I went to the mouse course last week I wouldn't actually have known a bonded surgical needle from an unbonded surgical needle (or at least I wouldn't have known what they were called).
The course was less stressful than I was anticipating. I haven't worked with animals up to now - I did Hons on an E.coli system, then moved on to a human familial cancer syndrome, then human specific viruses and then on to plants. So working with animals didn't really present a problem.
Unfortunately I'll probably be working with mice some time in the next six months (plants, God, the airconditioning in the grow room and the glasshouse willing of course) so I've had to go and do these courses. The one last week was for surgery, which I don't think I'll actually have to use but I thought might be useful anyway.
I was a bit stressed about starting the surgery - they gave us a list of things to attempt, beginning with finding a vein in the leg of our rat. The rats were anethesised - in my rat's case extremely heavily. I think I had the only rat whose anesthetic didn't start wearing off at all. That may also have been because I was obviously not that enthused about cutting anything:
"I'll just watch".
"You're here to do this and practice".
"Yeah, I know, but I'll watch first for a bit..."
"Are you feeling OK? You're not faint?"
"No... I might just watch for a bit first though..."
In the end I found the vein, and then opened the abdomen and restitched it (we practiced on wetsuit material first). In the middle of restitching the muscle (which, incidentally was much easier than restitching the skin) my rat died.
It certainly didn't regain consciousness, which was good. And given how under it was I doubt it felt any pain. And even if the level of anesthetic hadn't killed it it still would have been put down at the end of the day.
I apologised to it anyway. :-(
I decided in the end not to practice putting the catheter in, mostly because I couldn't really envisage any situation where I might need to do that. The nice course admin person found me a syringe so I could practice gavaging on my dead rat which was good - I'd much rather get the feel for it on something that I know isn't going to be hurt. And I will be gavaging on mice - may as well start with something larger and get the hang of that first.
Next week is the "Administration of substances" course, which will involve a lot of taking blood from the mice and practicing injecting. We also have a plastic rat to practice injections on.
The initial "theory" part of the course was mostly interesting. The ethics of animal work end up being very personal - everyone has to come to terms with working in their own way. I'm not hugely happy about needing to work with mice, but I can deal with the initial part of the experiment (feed mice lettuce, take blood for Ab levels) at least. Challenge with parasites (assuming there are significant Ab levels) will be the interesting bit, but I'll deal with that when/if we get to it.
I'd be happier doing the Ab stuff on humans, but unfortunately we can't at this stage. The cancer clinical trials were different, given that the patients had failed all other treatments available. Until there's some evidence (via animal work) that there is a protective response with vaccines they can't be tried on humans. And even then, as the recent HIV vaccine trial showed, promising results don't always translate across species. I still find it ethically dodgy that HIV vaccine and treatment trials are invariably tried out in the third world though. Blood Sisters by Greg Egan (in the Axiomatic collection) looked at the problems with current drug trials and a possible solution that companies would use to get around the ethical problems of having to end trials before enough statistically significant data is gathered.
Still. I'm hoping that if there is reincarnation I don't come back as a lab rat.
</lj-cu
Last night I dreamt I'd lost a bonded surgical needle (and thread, er der) somewhere in the bed and I had to find it before I stabbed myself.
Until I went to the mouse course last week I wouldn't actually have known a bonded surgical needle from an unbonded surgical needle (or at least I wouldn't have known what they were called).
The course was less stressful than I was anticipating. I haven't worked with animals up to now - I did Hons on an E.coli system, then moved on to a human familial cancer syndrome, then human specific viruses and then on to plants. So working with animals didn't really present a problem.
Unfortunately I'll probably be working with mice some time in the next six months (plants, God, the airconditioning in the grow room and the glasshouse willing of course) so I've had to go and do these courses. The one last week was for surgery, which I don't think I'll actually have to use but I thought might be useful anyway.
I was a bit stressed about starting the surgery - they gave us a list of things to attempt, beginning with finding a vein in the leg of our rat. The rats were anethesised - in my rat's case extremely heavily. I think I had the only rat whose anesthetic didn't start wearing off at all. That may also have been because I was obviously not that enthused about cutting anything:
"I'll just watch".
"You're here to do this and practice".
"Yeah, I know, but I'll watch first for a bit..."
"Are you feeling OK? You're not faint?"
"No... I might just watch for a bit first though..."
In the end I found the vein, and then opened the abdomen and restitched it (we practiced on wetsuit material first). In the middle of restitching the muscle (which, incidentally was much easier than restitching the skin) my rat died.
It certainly didn't regain consciousness, which was good. And given how under it was I doubt it felt any pain. And even if the level of anesthetic hadn't killed it it still would have been put down at the end of the day.
I apologised to it anyway. :-(
I decided in the end not to practice putting the catheter in, mostly because I couldn't really envisage any situation where I might need to do that. The nice course admin person found me a syringe so I could practice gavaging on my dead rat which was good - I'd much rather get the feel for it on something that I know isn't going to be hurt. And I will be gavaging on mice - may as well start with something larger and get the hang of that first.
Next week is the "Administration of substances" course, which will involve a lot of taking blood from the mice and practicing injecting. We also have a plastic rat to practice injections on.
The initial "theory" part of the course was mostly interesting. The ethics of animal work end up being very personal - everyone has to come to terms with working in their own way. I'm not hugely happy about needing to work with mice, but I can deal with the initial part of the experiment (feed mice lettuce, take blood for Ab levels) at least. Challenge with parasites (assuming there are significant Ab levels) will be the interesting bit, but I'll deal with that when/if we get to it.
I'd be happier doing the Ab stuff on humans, but unfortunately we can't at this stage. The cancer clinical trials were different, given that the patients had failed all other treatments available. Until there's some evidence (via animal work) that there is a protective response with vaccines they can't be tried on humans. And even then, as the recent HIV vaccine trial showed, promising results don't always translate across species. I still find it ethically dodgy that HIV vaccine and treatment trials are invariably tried out in the third world though. Blood Sisters by Greg Egan (in the Axiomatic collection) looked at the problems with current drug trials and a possible solution that companies would use to get around the ethical problems of having to end trials before enough statistically significant data is gathered.
Still. I'm hoping that if there is reincarnation I don't come back as a lab rat.
</lj-cu
