I got a very difficult call at around three o’clock this afternoon. There were tears on both ends during it. I thought I would have no words, let alone a photo, today.
But on the walk home from the hatchery, to go get into my truck and drive to the hospital, I walked past a bike lane …. what the hell do you call the painted symbol anyway? That I guess. I walked past the bike lane symbol and a very funny memory wriggled out of the back of my brain.
Well, that’s not entirely true. When I got that phone call earlier, the person at the other end, through their tears, told me that our mutual friend had told them the story that I am going to tell you.
I’ve probably told this story somewhere before, but I’m going to tell it again, and this time I dug around through my photo albums and scrapbooks until I found the photo I knew I had that provided a little bit of very entertaining evidence of the event.
I was about to say “See, I even carried a camera back then all the time, even when it was film” But I just realized that this was somewhere in around 2002 or so….and I think I had a really early digital camera back then. And if it wasn’t my digital camera, then it’s entirely possible it was the first one that we had in the lab that used a 3¼” floppy disk.
You read that right.
A digital camera that used a floppy disk.
But that’s not the memory, that was just another memory that found its way up from the tar pit just now.
So that means that somewhere, on my backup drive, I may have these photos in a digital format.
And, because I am moderately OCD….I had to take a break from writing this and go do just that. So now I have a photo of three photos in a scrapbook….and three digital photos that I was looking for. In looking for those three photos (and I have digital photos that go back to the year 2000) I discovered that I took a LOT of really shitty and blurry images. Luckily I didn’t take nearly as many photos back then as I do now and I found what I was after in the year 2001, December 14th of that year, to be precise.
Aaaaaanyway.
Back to that memory.
My labmate, Rosalind, and I were in the lab …apparently on December 14th of 2001 though I never would have pulled that out of the air….and I was gearing up to sample a batch of fish from an experiment I was running.
No experiment EVER goes smoothly or according to plan, and this one was no different.
Ros had offered to help me with my sampling and, once I got everything set up…ice in a basin, lethal anaesthetic does mixed up, syringes all heparinized, tubes labelled and laid out, scalpel blades and dissecting tools ready to go….I netted the first batch of fish into the lethal bath and scooped out the first fish that stopped breathing.
I took a blood sample and passed the fish to Ros to take a kidney and liver sample.
And the lights went out.
It was the middle of the day and the lab had high windows that spilled light in, so it’s not like it was that dark, but there was no power.
No power meant no way to spin the blood to separate the plasma from the cells.
Ros asked me what I wanted to do, I wouldn’t have lost that many fish if we bailed.
I said I figured they’d get the power on quickly and decided to forge ahead.
Except the power did not, in fact, come back on quickly.
It did not come back on by the time we sampled the last fish.
Now what.
We dropped the tissue samples into the freezer quickly, but I still had those blood samples that I really needed.
I put the lid on the cooler and decided to go for a walk to see if I could find someone to give me an idea of when the power might come back on. Most people had vacated the building and gone elsewhere when the lights went out. But as I walked past a lab at the far end of the building I saw a door open and I glanced in as I walked by.
And then I stopped and walked backwards to the door again.
I saw a bicycle.
I entered the lab to look for the owner, a guy was sitting at a desk reading but the light from the window.
“Excuse me.”
“Yes?”
“My name is Paige, and I have a very strange request for you.”
<eyebrows up and a curious look on his face>
“I’m working over in 144 and was in the middle of an experiment when the power went out. Now I have about a dozen Eppendorf tubes containing fish blood that I need to spin down, but ….well…you see my current problem. I think I can spin my blood using your bicycle…may I borrow it?”
I think my request was so ludicrous that he didn’t even question me…..he nodded and said “sure”. I told him I’d bring it back in twenty or thirty minutes at most.
When I got back to the lab with my prize, Ros just looked at me and said “Where did you get THAT?”
“Other wing.”
She was astonished that someone would just hand over what she told me was not an inexpensive bike (news to me). But she also knew where I was going with this.
When I saw the bike I was reminded of a story my graduate supervisor told me about a time he was on sabbatical in Kenya and they found some fish living in some very hypoxic conditions and they were curious how they could manage. For whatever reason, they had some microhaematocrit centrifuge tubes, but no sealant or centrifuge, however…. they had bubblegum and a car and a lot of ingenuity. They killed some of the fish and took blood from the caudal peduncle, sealed the ends of the tubes with the bubblegum, and then taped the tubes to the engine fan. Then they revved the engine to whatever RPMs a microhaematocrit centrifuge needed to run at.
I used to be able to tell you what that number is….but I’ve deleted that nugget of knowledge in favour of some other, although oddly, I just retrieved one of those old centrifuges from an old offsite DFO locker because one of my staff was trying to figure out out how to find one of the ancient things….and I found him one……but I digress.
The bottom line is, it worked for them….and I could do the same, manually, with a bicycle…dammit.
I flipped the bike upside down and taped the tubes to the spokes, and then Ros and I took turns spinning the pedal until the blood had separated enough that I could pipette off the plasma.
And that is what it takes to get your PhD research done sometimes.
That and a really great labmate.
I am eternally grateful to have had the opportunity to have so many wonderful and supportive labmates.
Ros isn’t doing well.
She’s fighting the fight of her life, for her life.
Writing this story out makes me start crying. But it’s still a really good memory. And right now I am exceptionally grateful that I’ve always taken so many shitty photos….
