The little blue spots

I often wrote about them, but never had the bandwidth to upload a photo.  Here they are, the little blue spots on MI medium, the source of so much heartache and ultimately so much joy – ladies and gentlemen, I give you – E coli.

No dog-sleds in Ghana

I think it was one of the books that made its way to our home via those colourful and enticing Scholastic catalogues that they distributed at Junior School.  I don’t remember choosing it or buying it, but I remember sitting on the futon on our upstairs landing and reading the true story of Balto in one sitting.  Maybe its the double-whammy of brave animals and sick children, but something about the story has always moved me in a way I can’t logically explain.  Just thinking about it can make me well up; I can’t recount the story out loud without a lump forming in my throat.

Balto was a huskie dog, a lead dog for a sledging team.  In the deepest Alaskan winter, an outbreak of the deadly infection diphtheria broke out in the remote town of Nome.  Diptheria is a particularly nasty breed of throat infection – its toxins cause a web-like membrane to form across the throat, covering the airway, choking and suffocating the victim to death.  Diptheria is now included in the childhood vaccination programme in the UK, but even back in the bad old days, a potentially life-saving antitoxin was available.  But the antitoxin batch in Nome was long expired, and insufficient in any case.  The cases, and mortalities stacked up.  The infection was spreading, and children were dying.  As word of the outbreak spread, antitoxin stocks were released from the Anchorage, but in the harsh winter the only safe way to transport them to Nome in time to save lives was by dog-sledge, in a feat known as the Nome Serum Run.  I forget how many brave teams formed the chain that was planned to race the antitoxin across the state.  Balto was the lead dog of one of these teams.  They set out in the midst of a terrible storm, so severe that their driver, Gunnar Kaasen, was at times unable to see any of the dogs.  Navigational and logistical difficulties led them to complete not only their own leg, but also the following two legs of the trip, in almost complete darkness and in agonising cold.  The dogs, led by Balto, battled on until they reached Nome, where their frost-bitten and snow-blinded driver is said to have uttered the words “Damn fine dog,” before collapsing in the snow.  The antitoxin was delivered, lives were saved.  Balto became a national hero.  His statue still stands in New York’s Central Park.

We can’t be sure if the child in the isolation room had diphtheria, though the signs all pointed towards it.  We can’t know for sure because the (relatively simple) lab tests needed to confirm the diagnosis weren’t available.  Neither was antitoxin.  Neither was money to send for antitoxin.  Or money to send him to another hospital- for an expert opinion, for supportive care, for a cure, for hope.  He died, of a vaccine-preventable, treatable infectious disease, in the year 2013.

On a year of bugs

Tomorrow it will be one week since I finally submitted my masters thesis.  It will also be one year since the journey really started – that first night in Peckham sleeping in a sleeping bag on a rickety single bed, my one bag of belongings spread out on the floor around me; the first walk through Burgess Park to Camberwell Road, buying crazy pink leggings at the East Street Market; the first time I caught the 63 bus to King’s Cross and was dismayed at how long it took; a first night out with cider in the White Horse; my first attempt at cooking plantains.  Then those first-day-of-school nerves, deciding what to wear, worrying that everyone else seems to know each other already, then meeting Phil (my first fellow microbiologist!), then Catherine, Adam, Mark, Naomi, Chantelle, Nenna and all the others, biology-nerd jokes (“I wish that I was DNA helicase…”), free sandwiches.

Last September, I didn’t know what “molecular biology” was, never mind “genomics”, “quorum sensing”, “slip-strand miss-pairing”, “sub-genomic RNA” (actually still don’t know what that last one means).  I hadn’t done an essay-based exam since school.  I wasn’t used to learning by lectures.  I had never done a gram stain, or a catalase test, or streaked a plate for single colonies, or put up a peptone water.  It is fair to say that I was pretty far out of my comfort zone.  I didn’t tell many people at the time, but during that first term I went to see my personal tutor to ask about whether I could consider changing onto one of the public health courses- not because I didn’t want to do microbiology, but because I felt that there was a very real possibility that I wouldn’t pass my exams.  I felt that I was slipping behind already.  He calmly told me to wait until the after the mid-term exams before making any major life decisions.  Wise words.  Bit by bit, microbiology became a bit less scary, then it even started to seem like quite good fun – the moustache sketches and blue-tac dinosaur models that we would find on our lab bench, the endless jokes about “very small rods”, foozball tournaments during “incubation periods”, revision sessions with endless quantities of pizza and Doritos.

I forgave Peckham for the long commute, and began to fall in love with London.  I learned to love the buses.  My commute, which took me first on a morning walk past the Burgess Park duck pond, then over Waterloo bridge on the 168 bus, could make me smile no matter how stressed out I was.  People seem to have a tendency to congregate in London, and I was able to reconnect with some amazing old friends of mine; the happiness that this brought me cannot easily be expressed in words.  I lived in the same city as my older sister for the first time in nearly 10 years (the morning that I showed up for lectures with HP smeared across my face attests to some of the perks of this!), I was also able to see my aunt Penny and cousin Laurence more regularly than I ever have in my life.  I made new friends, wonderful new friends, too.

As I write this, I don’t feel sad or emotional that its over.  What’s left is happiness, fond memories, an overwhelming gratitude for an amazing opportunity.  And perhaps a smouldering, glowing love for microbes, and a desire to understand more about their tiny little world, the infections they cause, how we can kill them, how we can work with them.  I said many times over the last year “I don’t want to be ‘A microbiologist.’”  I couldn’t see myself peering down a microscope all day.  During my thesis-writing-pits-of-hell weeks I would watch enviously as my housemates donned scrubs and stethoscopes and headed off to be real medical students, wishing I could join them.  My return to medicine couldn’t come quickly enough….

But on only my second day back in hospital I found myself sneaking off into the cosy intrigue of the lab, all crystal violet stains and worn chairs, and blood smears dyed a variety of pretty colours, shiny new microscopes and ancient centrifuges, friendly people in white coats and a fuzzy telling broadcasting Ghana v Zambia.  It was my first time there, but it felt like home.

Anatomy of an MSc thesis

Word count: 8247 (for comparison, current blog document word count is 16,820)
Page count: 78
Tables: 9
Figures: 9
Individual samples: 450
SPSS data sets: 12
Times wall punched: 2
Hours spent fantasising about catching an exotic tropical illness to avoid thesis-writing: shamefully large number
Patience of housemates in listening to incessant thesis-related bitching: saint-worthy
Soundtrack: Django Unchained – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Comfort food of choice: chocolate muesli (sorry Torben, I ate it all)
Series (yes, series) of Game of Thrones watched for procrastination: 2
Will-power needed to prevent indulgence in Harry Potter movie marathon: astronomical

and breathe.

I would like to tell you that my blogging hiatus has been down to dedicated focus on my thesis write-up, but the frustrating truth is that for some unknown reason I have been unable to access WordPress for the last couple of weeks.  Maybe in its infinite and mysterious wisdom the internet somehow knew about all the work I had to do and decided to help me out by blocking one of my favourite procrastination avenues.  But for whatever reason, it seems to be working again now, and over the next few days I’m going to aim to play catch-up a bit.  Watch this space!

Dissertation race

The remnants of the mosquito bites (yes, ok, I scratched them) remain, and have now been joined by some mystery facial swellings.  When I woke up this morning, my left eyelid was huge and swollen like a boxer, and although I convinced it to subside with an ice-pack and a hefty dose of ibuprofen, it reappeared on the left side of my upper lip, in a bee-sting ugly pea-sized lump.  In the absence of any real proof, I blame the army of ants that seem to have taken over our kitchen of late, but whatever the cause, the new lumpiness is visually displeasing and this put me in a sulk for most of the morning, then sent me to a pharmacy this afternoon in search of anti-histamines.  Basically, this is my long-winded way of telling the world that I am (totally unfairly) blaming Rhizin (cetirizine hydrochloride) for my lack of productivity this afternoon.

I’ve reached that awkward stale-mate stage with my research.  The point where we stare suspiciously at each-other from our respective sides of the laptop screen, but neither is quite sure what to do.  The completed first draft, but revision is needed.  How major should the revisions be, how long should I spend, how many references does it need, how long is a piece of string, how many episodes of Game of Thrones have my housemates watched while I’ve been stuck in the library enjoying a Rhizin-sponsored nap?  Completing that first draft is like a sprint to the finish line, only to find that beyond it is a long meandering jog where the route is poorly marked and you aren’t really sure where you are anymore.  You’ve lost the urgency, but you can’t relax.  Limbo-land again.