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Member
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Join Date: Apr 2014
Posts: 214
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Member
Join Date: Apr 2014
Posts: 214
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I agree the negativity on here gets to me too. I can't fault the people posting it (I've certainly posted my fair share!), I fault me extrapolating others' experience to my own. This is hard for me not to do, but I feel like I am getting a little better at not doing that.
Anyway, I'll try to add some positivity with a small success and example of a workaround I had today. I'm a grad student studying evolutionary biology, and before my accident I was doing loads and loads of cricket matings, mating a female of one species to a male of the same species and a male of a different species (I study a genus of Hawaiian crickets that forms new species very rapidly, so it's a good system to study how new species form). Anyway, all these experimental females had a bunch of offspring, which I collected and put in the freezer shortly after they hatched.
While this was happening I was super busy with a double teaching load, and there was really no way around just putting the crickets into the freezer in a somewhat disorganized way. Fast-forward to now, I have about 4,000 nymphs distributed in a barely organized way among about 50 boxes. I need to extract DNA from some portion these nymphs and then do paternity analysis on families of offspring, but to do that I need to know where everyone is.
I took pictures of all the labeled tubes where the crickets are frozen in all the boxes, and have been slowly going through the pictures, taking an inventory of which crickets are in which box. Doing this by myself took a toll, with a lot of computer screen time, and translating each label (made with my less than stellar handwriting) into a word document. I ended up enlisting the help of my parents, calling them to have them record me as I read off the labels. This way I didn't have to read and type, which was easier, and there were no errors in reading the labels. I still could only do a handful of boxes at a time, but over the course of a few weeks, I finally finished today.
Haha, probably too much information for everyone, but I'm glad to have this out of the way, and can now proceed much more easily with the rest of the experiment, and am one step closer to figuring out what's going on!
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26 year-old PhD student in evolutionary biology, slipped on ice in Feb 2014 while clipping my fingernails and walking to save time (dumbest reason for PCS ever?). Initially just had headaches and didn't feel quite right, but a minor head bump 5 days later started a downward spiral of anxiety, depression, insomnia and fatigue. Had trouble concentrating on reading/looking at screens
April 2014 - did exertion test, passed, started exercising and doing more, but didn't feel much better.
May 2014 - Went on backpacking trip OK'd by doctor, trip itself went fine, but felt worse a few days after getting back, more difficulty concentrating, worse headaches.
June 2014 - Bumped head on ceiling walking slowly down stairs, no immediate symptoms, but caused worsening headahces, more difficulty concentrating and looking at screens. Have not felt as good as I did before this since this bump.
December 2014 - after feeling relatively better I went xc skiing and fell but didn't hit my head (something my psychologist who specializes in brain injuries told me he hoped would happen so I saw it was OK), felt worse
Feb 2015 - back in grad school, light teaching load and some research, nowhere close to operating at my full capacity. Still have constant headaches, difficulty reading/looking at screens, mild anxiety and depression, and just not feeling like my normal sharp self.
Trying, but struggling, to believe that I'll get back to my old self, or at least get close.
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