The silence of the labs

So, some of my favourite people are currently all over the blog scene and, feeling left out, I have decided to see if there is anything remotely blog worthy about my life.

Currently I am in the final few months of my Masters in Immunology and Allergy. A course with a name that sounds sort of exciting and intensely sciencey and as such always gets a bemused and sort of pitying look from any cool people I happen to mention it to. In the next 3 months I will be spending every week day 9-5 in the labs of the QMC, a hospital in Nottingham so impossibly large that I have restricted my movements to only four different corridors in order to avoid unfortunate getting lost in stairwell incidents of which I will never speak again. In the lab I have to wear a tissue culture lab coat. Now most of the people I know, thankfully, have little day to day experience with lab coats of any sort. The type of lab coat I have to wear is about as all encompassing as you can get. It has a high neck that buttons all the way up, falls below my knees and has elasticated cuffs that are tight even on my rather weak and ineffectual wrists and must be like tourniquets on those blessed with normal sized wrists. Basically it’s sort of horrible and makes me look like Igor from the Frankenstein type movies. On top of this it is about the warmest thing ever worn by humans, I would recommend them to arctic explorers or people whose jobs involve spending a lot of time in those giant fridge rooms. I have to keep it completely buttoned up and wear jeans and sensible trainer like shoes (in case I spill anything on myself which, knowing me, is really rather likely) which means that I basically spend the hours between 9 and 5 in a constant state of humid sticky horribleness with my hair tied back. This is not the glamorous lab life I was hoping for. Having watched far too much CSI (in which science actually looks pretty shiny and cool) I had hopes that I would swan about the lab, lab coat carefree and unbuttoned, flapping in the invisible breeze that Tyra Banks believes so hard in with fabulous hair swooshing around like a shampoo ad. I also dreamt of some sort of earth-shatteringly spectacular shoe situation, such as the YSL cage boots which are like Eiffel tower’s for the feet and simply beautiful, all set in night club like lighting to some fast and intense music that shows time moving so fast one barely notices it moving.

This is not the case.

Aside from the sweaty unpleasantness of the attire the lab is also almost completely silent. It’s not that the other people working in there aren’t nice, everyone is very friendly and helpful, just in a sort of silent way. We had the radio on, once, for about an hour, and that was amazing, but apart from that its just silence followed by more silence.

I do not do well with only me in my head to talk to. My mother and previous housemates will all attest to the fact that if left alone in silence for too long I will demonstrate with impressive accuracy exactly what the phrase “bouncing off the walls” should look like. When talking becomes an option I can’t help but talk non-stop so fast that the words sort of blur intonelongsentencewithsquealsandleapingandoccasionalburstsofveryloudlaughter. It’s not a good thing. Luckily my coursemate Mohit is in the same lab so I can speak to him every now and then but, as we are both being very careful not to spray blood everywhere, (in the experiments, I haven’t gone so insane that violence has occurred. Yet.) long stretches of time go by with NO.WORDS. Recently it reached the point where upon looking into the microscope at cells that had been separated out from my blood I excitedly squealed “Hello MEEEE!”. This was met with confused stares. As the whole confused stare happens a lot to me I don’t usually let it bother me but the rest of the lab also accompanied it with a sort of “shame on you for your excitement, we are real scientists and refrain from enthusiastic outbursts” look. I felt suitably chastised and so now keep all potentially inappropriate noises to myself. Containing all thoughts in my head between the hours of 9-5 (I know I keep mentioning 9-5 but I’ve been a student for 4 years now and this kind of schedule is alien to me) is likely to lead to a sort of temporary insanity and so, despite the fact that this blog is glaringly action free and therefore rather dull, I thought it best that someone out there be aware of the reasons for the change in my mental state. If something untoward (a word I love as it is often used in older Jane Austeny type literature as a way of glossing over murder, rape and molestation in a terribly British way) does happen, please make sure I am removed from the lab and allowed to attempt to recover before someone tries to have me committed.

(I have just noticed that I sort of implied I may molest someone if left in the lab for too long. This is very unlikely to happen. I may nakedly lunge at someone but molestation isn’t my style.)