(no subject)

[tylik]

...or the scissors, rather.

I ought to find or make an animal experimentation icon. It doesn't seem fair to post this under my dear and beloved little triose phosphate isomerase.

Today I learned to cannulate (insert tubes into) the carotid and femoral arteries of a rat. An adult rat, mind -- which is worth mentioning, as most of the work in the lab is done on young rats. (But then, the ferrets are adults, and bigger than the rats. However, I think C wants me to try to see if we can start using rats for a lot of the things we are currently using ferrets for, so ferret lovers, wish me luck.) This is still pretty hard. Not to go into the details of set up and anesthetization, you have to find the arteries, tie them off at on end and tether and kink them at the other, cut a tiny little hole into it (if you didn't kink it well enough it will now start bleeding all over the place, which not only isn't good for the rat, but makes further work really hard) stick one end of a fine forceps into the hole, and hold that hole open, thread the tube in (the tube is larger than the apparent size of the artery, but the artery is stretchy, still, your tube is about the size of fine fishing like, and you're doing the whole thing under a dissecting scope because it's all so small) push it up a ways, tie the tube into place, and check the pressure.

I got the femoral artery and both carotids on my first try. (My teacher said that she was on her third day before she managed to get it to work.) She told me that if I managed to get the carotid before she left, she'd show me how to hook up the ventilator. And we both laughed, because she was leaving in twenty minutes. Ten minutes later, I asked her if she could show me...

So she told everyone, and M (previously known as emeritus faculty person, or something like that) who had come over to commiserate on the horrors of trying to cannulate my first time said that I could have a great career ahead of me in vascular surgery. I told her that having worked with neurosurgery residents, I didn't think so. (She explained that they have a very hard job. I failed to explain that it wasn't that I thought they were bad people, I just got to see them out of their minds on sleep dep and making some very bad decisions because of it. I *know* what I'm like on sleep dep.)

And then I gave a lethal injection to a rat for the first time.

Throughout the process (the whole surgery, not just the injection) I would stroke the rat. It's another way to know what you are doing. You can not miss that it is warm and alive under your fingers, feel its soft fun and its quick little heart. And I wanted to comfort the rat -- after all, it was the victim of my inexpert surgery, anesthetized or not. It's one thing to kill them for data that you can't get another way. It's another to kill them just so you can learn to collect the data.

It's less bloody than I would have expected (well, except that I've seen it done before). The skin comes away from everything else easier than I would have thought. And then everything else is all held together by clear stretchy connective tissue. I have dealt with a lot of connective tissue from other perspectives before (mine is kind of weird, and connective tissue does odd things after the kind of injuries I have had). Slowly working through the layers makes me think about it yet another way. Trying to separate out a nerve, vein and artery is yet another perspective.

The two rules my teacher gave me to start with were thus: everything is tougher than you think, and, don't cut what you can't see.