Day 122: Moving forward

After the events of the past week, I need a break. Not just because of all the excitement that has occurred, but because I am sick. Like bad. There is never a good time to be sick per say, but if I had to be sick, this was about as good of timing as I could ask for. Let’s talk about what’s next once I’m feeling better.

Currently, I’ve finished finals, passed my qualifying exam, completed both my BRAIN meeting and the Neurotech conference, but I still have quite a bit of things left on my to-do list. Moreover, I think I’m about to get even more to work on.

Today I got an email from my PI asking to meet to discuss my plans moving forward now that I have finished my qualifying exam. There was also the hint that I was about to receive a new project of some sort. This makes me particularly nervous since I am pretty self sufficient and I’ve been working closely with my Co-PI to organize my new set of experiments to determine the limits of the new technique that I’ve come up with.

Unfortunately because getting both of my PI’s in the same room takes weeks of planning it’s hard to keep them both on the same page. Now, my PI wanted to meet with me today. However, as I’ve been mentioning I am terribly sick and today has unfortunately shown no reprieve from this. So I responded letting him know that I am ill and have yet to agree on when to meet. I’ve offered to meet with him tomorrow. However, I also have a doctors appointment and he wanted to meet at that time. So I’m still waiting to hear back from him to determine when we can actually meet. I’m hopeful.

I’m also still working to finish the prosthetic project for Lucas, our 8-year old boy who is missing his his hand and part of the left forearm. As you can see from the picture at the top of the post, we’re well on our way to printing our final (or more likely semi-final) version of the prosthetic. If everything fits well, we’re done. If not we may need to modify the internals to make everything fit. Lucas is still young, so the prosthetic is small because it needed to be somewhat proportional to his other hand. This means we need to fit everything into a very small enclosure and we had to get creative with how to do that. You’ll see what I mean when we finish the prosthetic.

In the meantime, still a lot to do and even with the break it’s going to be busy. Maybe I’ll get some time off for the holiday’s, maybe not. For now, I’m just focusing on feeling better and trying to get as much work done with as little effort as possible. At least until I can kick this flu or whatever it is that I have.

Until next time, don’t stop learning!