Day 149: An auspicious start

Well we did an experiment. I wish I could talk more about what we did, how we did, and why we did. Alas, I cannot. So instead, let’s talk about the vague how it went metric as in, maybe we found something maybe we didn’t, also this experiment highlights several quarks between the my school lab and the clinical lab.

As I predicted yesterday, we were working until the last minute to refine the experiment and work out all the bugs. Yesterday we did a dry run with one of the researchers, which we typically do for a lot of reasons. One, it gives us a chance to check the equipment, because it never fails something goes wrong (and it did, multiple times). Two, it gives us some pilot data to determine what we would be looking for in the actual study. Really, it gives us a way to tune the stimulation values and the way we select them.

Overall it went well, we found slight differences which makes me nervous, but that is a whole other story after we publish our findings. We have two experiments today, two on friday and two every day between monday through wednesday, so a lot going on.

On top of that schedule, tomorrow is my surgery day, so I will probably be moving a little slow afterwards. I’m anxious to get it over with, but it needs to happen so tomorrow is as good as any other time really. It’s unfortunate it has to be when school is going on, but sometimes it cannot be helped, specifically with the VA where you try to schedule the appointment months in advance.

Anyway that was my day, tomorrow is surgery, so I’m going to try to relax some today and get everything ready for tomorrow (antibacterial wash today and tomorrow morning, yay). Thus is a short(er) post, but I’ll give an update tomorrow after surgery. It will happen early in the morning, so expect a later in the day post from me (probably a short one too).