"There's a way to do it with scissors so you don't have to feel the skull crack."

Okay. Just a heads up, if brains and blood and small animals make you queasy, you probably shouldn't read this.

So things are already pretty intense. I woke up and made my way to the lab around 11. I swear I meant to video my route to work but today it was more like Chinwe vs. Nature vs. Time (I was running late in case you just don't get it). The first thing we did today was work on identifying brain sections. People, it's really hard. Usually the brains are sectioned from front to back (anterior to posterior), and as you go from one end to the other the structures within the brain change shape depending on which section you're in. So I took this book called The Mouse Atlas, which is filled with 'maps' of every section of mice brains, and tried to identify pictures of sections based on the shapes of the structures (I know I'm being vague but honestly, I don't even have all the names down and I don't want to confuse people). I also had to identify if they were young or old, and if they were ob/ob mice (Mice that don't have leptin, which is a hormone that inhibits appetite). It's pretty hard, not gonna lie. I've gotten to the point where I can narrow each slice down to being one of two sections with help from The Mouse Atlas and I can tell young from old when I don't have to take ob/ob mice into consideration. That's going to take some time. It's all going to take some time.

And then, I sliced my first brain. It was a female ob/ob mouse brain (I'm going to be working with all females, no complaints there haha) and it already had a small chunk missing so there was no pressure to do well (That was probably a result of a botched brain-removal job, something I will be learning soon). I'm so thankful Jamila gave me this one as my first brain because honestly, I completely destroyed the sucker. What happens is the brain is in some kind of frozen fluid so it looks like a little ice cube and you glue it to a surface and then mount it on what looks like that thing they slice deli meat with at the grocery store. Then you have this piece of glass that looks like a really thick microscope slide and a really long razor blade. When you turn this huge handle on the side of the machine, it lowers the surface that the brain is mounted on so it brushes across the razor and takes a slice off the brain. The glass is there to keep the slice from wrinkling and from flying off the razor. Then you take a microscope slide and press it down on the slice and it sticks to the slide. It's a little bit more complicated than that and there's a whole list of 'don'ts' (which I learned the hard way) but that's the general idea. Just so you have an idea of how good I am at this, at one point I accidentally moved the mounted brain too close to the blade and when I was trying to fix it I shaved off the biggest, most uneven chunk of brain ever. I butchered it so badly that my next ten or so slices looked like swiss cheese. Swiss brain cheese.

I know I'm talking about this in a totally nonchalant way, but the slicing really isn't as bad as it might sound. You want grotesque? So I'm putting away my tools at the end of the day, and I walked by someone's lab desk and there's this mouse. And this mouse has been decapitated and the head was kind of crushed and is just chillin' there next to the body. The entire abdomen was open and all the organs were visible. And this was all located in a small pool of blood. Just chillin'. I had a moment where I needed to stop and remember what I signed up for. The good news is, I am prevented by law from killing any mice. So all of you that were worried about that, there you go. The most I'll have to do is remove the brain from a freshly decapitated mouse, which I mentioned earlier. I don't know if that's much better, but I know I'm going to have to go the whole nine yards eventually. It's apart of the career path.

Tomorrow, Chinwe vs. Nature (and probably vs. Time because I have to be there at 9:30 for lab meeting), I promiseee.

Oh, anndddddd:

I'm official! Apparently there's a sweet view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the library, and now that I have an ID I can actually go in and check it out. Perhaps I'll do that tomorrow as well.

CHINwe