Today began well: six hours slept, one hour on freeway, one hour working on a surgery procedure write-up before the lab meeting. Dr. Zivago didn't show up until the tail end, but we re-capped things for him while he broke in with various comments or requests. I bring up most of the business nowadays, being the unofficial lab administrator.

Aside from taking care of small things and finalizing some proposals, I scrubbed the injection and surgery rooms to practice putting a rat on ear bars.

(If animal research or graphic depictions of death and rigor mortis bother you, I suggest not reading any further. It does not get pretty, nor positive.)

This bit deserves more explanation. In order to perform surgery on a rat's brain, you have to obviously open the skull. To open up a skull, you need an immobile rat whose head is fixed. In order to fix a rat's head in place, we use a device that has two metal bars stiff along both sides. From these metal bars come two small bars, each of which just about fits inside a rat's ear. In front of the rat's muzzle is a metal loop where you can fit the front teeth down and lock the muzzle in place.

Trying to get ear bars into a rat takes a hell of alot of practice. Noone can tell you how to do it. Allegedly you just get it evetually.

So after alot of prep time I finally drugged the animal. It did not pass out; it barely started stumbling. This vexed the absolute hell out of me. Dr. Ziv had a solution, though: place the rat in a bell jar and put some cotton swabs dabbed in a chemical that knocks stuff out. I had not alternative so I went for it.

I won't describe the rat scrambling up the sides or how it suddenly stopped moving. It looked dead. I began performing CPR without giving tongue. The heartbeat suddenly came back minutes later. I took the rat to the surgery room and tried finding the "bony notch" in the ear canal where an ear bar would go. To my surprise, the rat squeaked after 10 minutes. I dabbed some of the knockout chemical on a gauze strip and gave the rat a high. It seemed chill. Then it happened again. This was a completely botched surgery.

So I tried administering the knockout chemical for longer this time. After a minute or two, the rat regained that 'looked dead' appearance, not noticeably breathing or moving.

I started to go to work by trial and error, pressing either ear bar at all sorts of bizarre angles trying to find a fit. Two hours past. The rat hadn't moved. It occured to me that he might be dead. At the time I didn't think much of it, since I had been standing most of the time, my spine twisting out of place and back knotting all the while.

After three hours and some marginal success, the body started feeling slightly cold. The tongue had swelled and distended, a dead purple worm lolled out to the side in some sick plea. The left eye had glazed over as if it had a cateract.

I kept trying to fit in the ear bars, but the rat became more and more difficult to move and maneuver. An odd smell crept up my usually defunct nose. The body grew colder with time. It started hurting my hand, as if the tips of my fingers were just getting frost-bite.

I looked down at the rat and picked up its tail. I dropped the tail. I did it again. I'd known for awhile it had to be dead, but the cold feeling all along its body confirmed it. I giggled in that nervous filling the silence with noise way. By the time I'd finally given up, the entire rat shell couldn't move. It was stuck that way: laid out flat, spread-eagle for surgery.

I despise wasting life for no good purpose; I always have in research. This is the first animal I've ever killed intentionally (since if it hadn't died I would have had to euthanize it at the end of the surgery). I'm disgusted with the fact that there isn't a better way to practice pre-surgery than by this method.

I'm incredibly angry; I'm pissed off at losing an animal without gaining much benefit from it.

I need to read articles for Dr. Zivago's class on wednesday, but all I want to do is listen to Tool and be upset. It wouldn't make a difference, though, I've already done that for hours. So off I go to be productive.

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