Mice and men!
I’ve always been queasy about handling mice. I really dont mind dissecting dead ones; it’s the live ones that bother me. The first time I ever handled a mouse, I jumped (yeah, me not the mouse) and let the mouse go and it was away merrily exploring the lab while I was hysterically calling upon my prof. He was rather nice about it, considering it all. I was awful at handling mice. Correction. Still am. One of my experiments involves injecting mice with stuff Im hoping will knock down a gene of interest. Im really excited about the project and it will be absolutely awesome if it works. And therein lies the caveat: IF.
That aside, my major fear is injecting these animals. Today, a fellow PhD student in lab offered to train me on handling a mouse. Im sure he felt he had made an awful mistake less than 5 minutes later. I am pathetic 
I cant even let a little mouse walk around on the palm of my hand without getting all agitated. It’s really not easy though. You have to sort of place your palm on the back of the mouse, use your index and thumb fingers to hold it by the scruff of its neck, get most of the skin into ur fingers and turn it around. Then you wrap the rest of ur fingers holding it still and hold the tail in your little finger. With your left hand then (unless you’re a leftie, you would do this with your right hand) you would hold up the syringe and inject the mouse somewhere in the vicinity of its lower abdomen. And of course the mouse flinches when you try to push the needle into it. Eeeeeeeeeeks. I’ll have to master this technique soon, so I suppose this is what I will be doing for the next couple of weeks at least.
On a completely different note, Jagadish and I had a little sort of a tiff the other day. And made up 
I can get sooo mad at him and he (even worse) can get awfully angry at me and yet it never lasts very long. One thing I’ve found out though is how much I hate disappointing him. I feel really awful when he gets angry because of stupid things I do. He’s always sweet enough to forgive me for it afterward, but it always lingers on in my mind. I dont know which is worse: his anger or his disappointment in me. Anyway, I think I’ve just found one more reason to love him.
Mennnnnnn! Geez
No related posts.
Why not make the mice sleep off using some inhalational anaesthetic before you lay your hands on them?
And you shouldn’t be writing about such things on a public blog. The peta guys might just get after you for mishandling animals :p
well they’re animals being used for research. and peta has nothing to do with it.
Vijay, I thought of that too but my prof is reluctant to include that in the protocol for the big important experiment when we havent used it before.. *sighs* There are, however, mice restrainers that I might try. Of course getting htem into the restrainer is another matter altogether