My "someone is siphoning blood from me" alarm still works

I have discovered, through trial and vomit (and multiple research projects that have dragged me into them), that I can give three vials of blood easily, start to feel nauseated on four and throw up should people be foolish enough to continue (say 6-7ml/vial=24-28ml max). This is why I don't give blood. There's no point if the blood bank people have to take the blood bag off, throw it away because its not full and then clean up my vomit. Waste of their time, waste of my time - and lunch.

I haven't given more than one vial of blood at a time for a few years but today I gave four vials of blood for a Q fever research project (as I have been vaccinated against Q fever and am a conveniently close research subject). I wouldn't have volunteered if they were going into dangerous five vial territory. Fine through vials 1-3, queezy about two seconds into vial 4. Afterwards I had to go have a sit down, a drink and some fruit and nut mix. I'm told I went pale. I'm still feeling vaguely off.

Strangely enough I don't have low blood pressure (dead normal really). Yet, should anyone (secretly and without my knowledge) start siphoning me, my body tells me pretty quick smart and at the same volume each time.

I'm so immature...or alternately 'maintaining my inner child"

You've Experienced 56% of Life

You have a good deal of life experience, about as much as someone in their late 20s. You've seen and done enough to be quite wise, but you still have a lot of life to look forward to.

How Much Life Experience Do You Have?

This was a little more fun

http://www.says-it.com/seal/index.php

Half the Jenny, All the taste

http://www.thesurrealist.co.uk/slogan.cgi/slogan.cgi?word=Jenny

I wish. But then it got creepy

All you need is a Jenny and a dream...
Jenny really satisfies...

Hmm might stop now

done done and done

Yesterday I finished up a good copy of my thesis (its approximately 40mm thick - or 247 pages). I put it on my supervisors desk and have washed my hands of it for the immediate future. Kathy said "So, now you can relax and have some free time." No, no no no no.
Now I can write four papers, finish the lab work I need to do so I can make one of the papers of much higher value, start writing the lectures for CS3006 for October, finish the pile of filing and small jobs that have been accumulating on my desk for the last three months, ring a bunch of people, oh, and at some point write a storyline and get props for my online Cruise of Cthulu game.

When I handed the thesis to my supervisor he said "Do you have anything planned now or would you like some more work?" Bwah ha ha ha. I pointed out the first three things on my list and was told "that seems like enough to do and is probably the most important thing you can do right now." So I don't even know what the work he had planned for me was.

In 20 minutes I pour a gel, set up the PCR samples to put in it, wait another 1/2 hour and run a gel for 2 hours, cut out any products and prep for another PCR and gel. In all the gaps, I'm writing a paper/doing a bunch of phone calling/small jobs. And thats Tuesday accounted for

In an aside, I had the biggest feeling of deja vu yesterday. I walked into a lab and Karen said "Hey jenny, did you hear Steve Irwin is dead?" The tone of voice was just the same as when I walked into the dining area of the B&B I was staying at with my little brother on the Isle of Skye and Doug said "Hey jenny, did you hear Princess Diana is dead?" My immediate response was the same - I waited for the punchline, followed by a real sense of disbelief: Young, famous people don't die. Of course they do, but you just don't expect it.

Grammar checking

I have recieved my thesis back from grammar checking. Much, much red pen later. My checker said he enjoyed doing it...to the point of finishing and thinking maybe he could start again with a different coloured pen. His girlfriend stopped him. It took me all day to go through 50 pages yesterday. Only 200 more to go. Then I have to reformat all the pages so paragraphs and tables go across the pages properly again and redo the TOC and tables and figures lists so that they reference the new pages that everything has shifted to....then I discuss handing in and printing the photographic/colour pages. At some point I should also discuss examiners.

bad, bad drivers

Has anyone noticed that drivers are getting worse? I seem to see more acts of stupidity, aggression and lack of road rule understanding every day. Just the other day, while waiting at a stops sign to turn left, the car opposite me waiting to turn right (ie onto the same bit of road I wanted to turn on) just drove on through behind the car I was waiting on. Pretty sure I had the right of way there.

What made me write was the bizarre set of circumstances that I was a witness to yesterday - and almost involved in.

Picture this, Dad is driving my car out to work to pick up his that he's left there. I'm in the passenger seat since I will need to drive my own car home. We are waiting at the ross river lights at Balls lane, planning to cross straight over Ross River road to cross street (which is a short two lane road, both lanes of which can turn right at the next set of lights onto Bowen road and hence out to the army base. Now, if you are on Ross river road and want to turn right onto Cross street, theres only so many cars that will fit if the Cross/Bowen road light is red. Big blue car doesn't care about that and moves across traffic on green arrow without ensuring space free to get out of oncoming lane. Small white car follows into intersection but not across traffic lane. There are no more cars behind this one. Green arrow goes off, oncoming traffic wants to move. Big blue car edges back - small white car refuses to back out of intersection...more forced edging until oncoming traffic can actually get through. Lights eventually go red and there's now enough space to drive into Cross street - both cars drive through.

If you are in an intersection when the light goes red, its not only legal to continue driving through, its illegal not to. This maybe why the white car didn't want to back back too far - she wanted to get to drive through on the red.

We now drive through and end up in right hand lane behind blue car. White car is in left lane. (Remember, both of these lanes turn right, though left lane can also turn left). Lights change, we all drive off. Big blue car does not remain in own lane, curving gently out into the left lane of Bowen road, forcing white car off the road. White car brakes and swerves back into left lane behind blue car...AND GET THIS !... continues swerving (not indicating) as though she is going to go into the right lane so she can get past the blue car. Due to relative speeds and the fact my dad styed in the right lane as he was supposed to, she almost ran straight into us...Much braking and honking. She then swerved back into the left lane, sped up and then, while indicating, cut us off by swerving back into the right lane in front of us (we'd slowed to avoid being hit the first time). My dad was rather peeved and spent the rest of the trip muttering about how if he'd been driving a Mack truck like he usually does, instead of a hyundai hatchback, the honking would have been much, much louder - and more aggressive.

The more i write the more recent idiot incidents come to mind. I'm a mild driver, accepting of mistakes and people acting cautious and not quite getting it right...they might be new after all. But lately it hasn't been mistakes of lack of experience, its been rank, arrogant, ignorance.

Fume fume fume.

Did I say I needed a day?

Having left my thesis alone for some time I started reading through it again. The science is fine. The grammar and sentance structure in general is horrific. I'm going through the chapters, printing out the pages where I think fixes are needed and writing notes on them. I want to see my supervisor about them before I go further, in case the fixes are just as bad as the originals...I'm printing out every second page at the moment.

shopping

The other day, for my diet, I bought a few bananas and a large piece of very nice steak. Guess which cost more.

recovery

wonders will never cease. Except for the occasional throat clearing and nose blowing, I appear to have gotten over the lurgy. Here endeth the comments about my health.

Now to my weight....I'm going on the week long diet to kick start my healthy living again. I will tell you how much I lose when I lose it (but not my actual weight. heh)

My thesis is sitting at the 2nd last draft stage and I need to read through and comment - but i need a full day. I'm also up to my gills in sequencing experiments to combine my genome for a paper I want to write. Soo busy right now.

Last weekend I shopped. Pavilion was closing down and I bought lots of stuff including a clock in the shape of a die to add to my 6 sided dice collection. I also bought these really nice green strappy high heel sandals from a little dress shop that I only went into to get a key to use the Urban Quarter shopping centres toilet. Expensive loo trip, but cheap shoes.

This weekend I may read my thesis after doing more shopping. I'd like to check out that clothing shop more thoroughly.

i'm thinking about quoting Dr who

A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but is by no means the most interesting - dr Who, from 'the time warrior"

This may end up being my quote in the front of my thesis...can I quote imaginary characters?

ill - my new normal state of health

I still have the cough. In fact, on Friday I had a relapse, spent the weekend in bed and I'm back to really bad cough. I don't however have a fever, so I had my fluvax today. The doc said that I should come back if I get any fever or productive cough. I'm suspicious my tonsils may be involved, but doctors are very hesitant about taking them out now, so even if they are, I bet I'd have to have this for 6 months before they'd consider it...must go and have a coughing fit now.

The Stargate season 9 DVD box set

will be on sale on the 17th of August. I have it in my diary. Seven has just started showing this season (late, on Thursday nights, with no advertising). By my calculations, even if seven shows an episode every week (not a good bet), they'll only be half way through before I can buy the whole season - which I will. Seven hates science fiction.

misc. et. al.

I'm still coughing. Will this disease ever end!

I didn't go to the show (no point in ensuring I stay sick for the rest of the year) and I'm sad. It was cheaper this year than it has been for some time and it looked good. I like the show.

I need to get a flu vax. I must remember to ring my doctor.

This long weekend (show day was monday) I did a lot of lying around coughing. In between bouts, I leveled the dish washer, planted a coffee bean, started to design a new online game, started to type up the names of my brothers books and determined that thyme is a really good companion plant for cabbage. I planted individual cabbage plants near each other some time ago, surrounded by different herbs. They all got chewed nigh unto death except the one nestled in the thyme.

I also managed to delete the sound driver on my computer by accident. I didn't realise it was the sound driver. I thought it was some insignificant extra program I'd installed. I then found that resetting to an earlier system setting, although it should work in XP, kept failing at the last section and freezing up. This is disconcerting. I was assuming I could rest if I screwed something up.

An online search determined that lots of other people have done what I have done and finding the driver requires that you know what your motherboard is. One opened computer later...I found the original disk for that motherboard in my files and happily reinstalled (only wasted about 2 hours and a bunch of my online time).

didn't I mention that?

One of my cousins was emailing me asking how things were. I thought "why isn't she reading my blog? Didn't I tell her about it?" Apparently - No, I didn't. She'd also never heard of them.
When I mentioned this to my mother she said "You never told me you had a blog." .....oops.

I have now passed on the address to my mother and am anticipating comments of a cringeworthy motherly type. Not because my mother is actually like that, but she has a warped sense of humour. Hi mum, Luv ya.

update on 'Lurgy

There's a general feeling I might have had whooping cough after all. Its going around and previously vaccinated people are getting it. As an adult, you don't always get the same symptoms as a child, the very long symptoms (still coughing all night and not doing a full days work) etc. etc though my coush does sound a lot like the one I have a link to.

The green stuff below is taken straight out of http://textbookofbacteriology.net/pertussis.html
The first stage, colonization, is an upper respiratory disease with fever, malaise and coughing, which increases in intensity over about a 10-day period. During this stage the organism can be recovered in large numbers from pharyngeal cultures, and the severity and duration of the disease can be reduced by antimicrobial treatment.

The second or toxemic stage of pertussis follows relatively nonspecific symptoms of the colonizaton stage. It begins gradually with prolonged and paroxysmal coughing that often ends in a characteristic inspiratory gasp (whoop). To hear the characteristic sound of whooping cough click whoop.wav (whoop.wav is copyright of Dr Doug Jenkinson, Nottingham, England. www.whoopingcough.net). During the second stage, B. pertussis can rarely be recovered, and antimicrobial agents have no effect on the progress of the disease.......................................Many young children are vaccinated against whooping cough with the pertussis vaccine. However, the vaccine is only approved for children under seven years of age. Antibody-mediated immunity wanes in approximately ten years, leaving older individuals more susceptible to the disease. Adults get infected, often to a lesser degree, but they are still able to spread the disease to unimmunized children.

Sounds very familiar. This means I may have spread it to Cairns, Kuranda, Mareeba, Innisfail (where I coughed in a very, very crowded Maccas at lunch time) and a few incidental places. I was hygienic with my coughing & did lots of hand washing, and my highly susceptible cousin hasn't come down with it, so maybe I haven't given it to anyone.

I knew I should have got someone to take a nasopharyngeal swab and streaked it out to check for Bordetella pertussis before I started antibiotics. Then I could have added the isolate to the clinical isolate collection in the -80C freezer.
I think the microbiologist in me is showing. We have a general attitude of; "wait, give me a sample/photo of the symptoms/biopsy of what the doctors take out so I can add it to the collection/use it for lectures/cut it up and look down a microscope at it"

Here endeth the microbiology lesson.

still sick but working

After two days off work and sleepless nights spent coughing, I went to the Doctor. She said "You aren't linked to the uni are you? There's whooping cough going around and if you haven't had a booster....." She gave me an antibiotic script just in case, though my cough wasn't whoopy and sent me home for another two days. Turns out the antibiotics were a good thing, as by the next morning I had an obvious and possibly secondary bacterial infection.

It took till Sunday night for the antibiotics to kick in and start cutting the symptoms back. I still haven't had more than three hours sleep a night, and I've wasted a week I could have been finishing my thesis, but I'm feeling better. I know this because I'm not hanging out checking the time, waiting till I can reload all the drugs into my system. BTW Ease-a-cold flue strength rocks!. Instead I'm thinking "hmm symptoms are getting worse again, oh yes, should have taken drugs 2 hours ago."

best bit about being sick for a week: getting to do some fiction reading that I hadn't had time for
most irritating bit: having no appetite for a week, eating very little and still not losing weight


Must get back to grading exams now. If I'm diligent I'll have them finished by tomorrow and can wallow in thesis editing for the rest of the week :)

sick as a dog

My father is a sharing man. He shared his cough with me. I have a chesty cough, a sore throat and a runny nose - and i'm sleepy without being able to sleep. I thought I was feeling better so i came into uni to hide in my office and do some work (so I wouldn't sicken others, I'm not a sharing person). I'm not feeling better. In fact, I've bundled up the exam papers i'm marking and copied my latest version of my thesis onto a dvd (its 128meg in size plus peripheral files) about a gig worth and I'm going home to pretend to work. Ironically, the question I'm up to marking is "name four airborn diseases and a risk factor for them - I'm willing to accept "common cold, Jenny's dad" as one answer right now. When I'm feeling better I will tell you all about my trip to Cairns.

I declare that this thesis is my own work and has not been submitted ...

So close I can smell the rejection letters from the examiners

Updated stats

My thesis, without an introduction, abstract and lists of tables, table of contents etc is now 223 pages long, made up of 63474 words. Just thought i'd let you know.