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Injury to injuries: portrait of a bad day

2005-04-12 - 8:18 p.m.

I broke into tears behind a thankfully closed door today. I'll get to that later.

It was the usual wake-up routine, the usual Mediterranean place I have my lamb and beef shawarma, and the same route I usually take to the psych building. Even stats mostly felt routine, although the topic we're covering--Power analysis in multiple regression--was really straight-forward.

And so after class I headed down to the lab, to organize more of the usual for the experiment. I got to the office unannounced, booted my office computer, checked my email...

My day promptly went straight to hell. And so did I.

What I had were a few messages from the building manager and my advisor. Things had been changing around too much, people were confused about what was happening when, and my neither of them sounded at all happy. I don't feel much of anything nowadays, but this hit me hard and sudden. I thought I'd kept everything relatively together, despite changing the dates of the experiment 4 times for 4 different reasons, rescheduling days because of insipid bureaucratic tests, and so many little things you'd be driven mad.

Apparently I hadn't kept it as together as I thought. I spent the rest of the 50 minutes between stats and primate behavior trying to modify my calendar on my office computer. See, I have the final one of my laptop, but the building broadband won't recognize my laptop--so I had to basically read from one screen, copy to another. And I was mostly done when 1pm rolled around.

But the thing wouldn't save. There were a bunch of weird errors, so I gave up on it and jetted to Dr. C's class. It was on social bonding, for monkeys as well as humans. For some reason the whole lecture was an intensely personal, sad experience. A more despairing hour I haven't had in ages. At least I got some insight into why I feel detached from almost everyone nowadays.

After the class I talked with Dr. C. He didn't look especially pissed or especially anything. I explained the central complication in his email that he really emphasized. I was going to reschedule with the animal care staff and the building manager today (tuesday), and I thought I'd just mention the needed rescheduling in person instead of via email. At the time I didn't think changing around the time because of something Dr. C and I discussed would be a problem. Basically he nodded through it and then mentioned that, if I was around the lab later, we should talk about the project. Some people were starting to have bad feelings about it.

I tried not to look completely devastated. I think I mostly succeeded. He mentioned it was to make some future workarounds for some possible complications.

I walked very slowly back to the lab. I didn't interpret what he said as a kiss of death, but it clawed a-hold of me, took me down deeper. I was in the most immediate despair and panic, thankfully missed with an otherwordly numbness. I thought if this was the beginning of the end, if something like this might lead to getting tossed out of the lab. I tried thinking about that possibility but my mind refused to.

I got back to the lab.

I went into damage control mode.

There was no time to indulge in emotionality.

So I checked with all the senior staff on the 1st floor: the building manager, G. and H. I talked to H first to see if I'd majorly pissed people off, and just to get her opinion of where I'd gone wrong. She mentioned a few times that everyone understood this was my first time getting started, and that complications and getting stuff wrong were bound to happen. As usual she was gracious and kind. She mentioned her door was open whenever I needed it. And I really appreciated that.

Next up was the building manager. I figured, if anyone, I'd stepped on her toes. Apparently that wasn't the case. She figured that it was just better to centralize the decision making, instead of having me run around like a chicken with my head cut off. She seemed genuinely good-natured about it and didn't seem at all off-put. Neither did Deb, the assistant I work alot with.

I walked back to my office, suddenly seized by an overwhelming shame and a rush of molten sadness. I closed the door and quietly cried for awhile. Maybe things were fine, but they didn't feel fine to me. To say I felt terrible would have been an understatement. I couldn't control myself for 10 minutes. I'd be sitting in my chair and just like that I'd start crying again.

Eventually I settled down enough to do some more planning re: the experiment.

A bit later on I checked with Gabe too. No problem there, just a need to organize--which I was in full agreement with. Most of these scheduling complications had come out of factors either beyond my control, or learning about new aspects of dealing with monkeys that forced me to re-think things and at what times I could do stuff.

So I'd talked to everyone, specifically apologize with complete and heart-felt sincerity, and inquired about their thoughts...and everything seemed fine.

So why had Dr. C mentioned there were bad feelings?

I got some more work done on the project, might've talked to some people about the 50 million things that go into such a thing, then talked to Dr. C. I told him that I'd talked with everyone, that I'd mentioned their thought about going through him or Gabe to get stuff done.

His basic suggestion was that someone should follow my project more closely for the first week. He talked for awhile about how he'd been thinking, way back to when he'd first been getting used to everything..or when others had just gotten started up. He came to the conclusion that he'd unfairly thrust me into organizing a monkey experiment when I knew next to nothing about how to do that. How to deal with assignment forms, drop forms, when pens are cleaned upstairs, when you could put monkeys back into their home pen, how to do X, Y and Z..and "about a 100 other things". He was very friendly about it, as is his nature.

I mentioned that I'd tried my best to get the project up independently, and that I hoped the obstacles and problems I'd run into didn't reflect badly on me. He said that I was just starting, this was my first time organizing all this, and mentioned what he'd already said. It kinda worried me, actually, that he repeated wanting to help tomorrow (wednesday) since it's a hardcore testing day, and to give me some more guidance on what to do. I was hoping that something I was saying wasn't prompting him to repeat himself.

I'm a neurotic son of a bitch, I admit it.

So that all seemed to work out. I spent the rest of the time between 4pm and 7pm taking care of more experiment stuff, talking with Gabe about the preparations for tomorrow, and making sure everything was in line. I was emotionally drained through the rest of the day. I couldn't shake the feeling I'd fucked up and that this would come back to haunt me, or worse be something that'd stick in people's minds. I tried pushing that to the side, though.

Hundreds of details later, I was half dead in my usual chinese place. It's run entirely by Americans, but it's chinese food, anyway. It'd been too long since I had food.

I thought about the week so far: not even an honorable mention for that one fellowship, getting this experiment up and running, and then all of the fall-out today, not to mention that lecture talking about social connectedness. Even now I don't want to think about any of it. It can be thought of tomorrow, I can worry about tomorrow. Only I can't. I still need to send out some stuff to the staff about the calendar, since it's good and official now.

* * *

After all this, I want to finish reading the articles I have for my Brain Damage class on thursday. I'm also mostly through the readings for the paper. I decided I'm going to focus on how certain kinds of perception-sensitive stressful events can cause the release of the cellular inflammation proteins I specialize in studying. Those proteins are implicated in causing withdrawal behaviors (and if you put 2 and 2 together, you can see why I'm so passionate understanding the why of it).

The nice thing about the paper is that 4 pages is already written, from a previous review paper I wrote last semester. All I need to add are summaries or make mention of these 22 new articles I have. There are another 5-6 that I need to still download/get from the library, but I have enough now that I can start looking at inescapable shock, restraint, social isolation, and chronic social conflict in rodents, then look at more human sorts of psychological stressors like exams. I finish the paper by looking at stressors that actually don't cause the release of these inflammation proteins. These include:

1) Exposure to a predator and predatory cues through a plexiglass cage

2) Being exposed to a fellow rat receiving inescapable shock

3) A rat being forced to swim

At least I think it's curious how certain stressors cause the release of these proteins (and lead to withdrawal behavior), whereas other stressors don't.

Dr. Vem will find it all very odd and cool. He's a neurosurgery prof. and focuses on the same inflammation proteins I do, but from a very different perspective--in stroke.

So all of that is going more or less well. Just need to spend some more time reading tonight, taking care of other stuff tonight.

Really I just want to curl up with someone specific in mind and feel her hair against my face. Unfortunately she's far away, but at least I can imagine.

More work. Later.

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