Back to the bloggosphere, well mostly...

I'm back.

It's been a long hiatus away from the bloggosphere, but frankly, so much has happened that I need a forum to talk about how I feel. Let me update you on what has happened.

Six weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a searing headache. It felt like someone had taken a hot knife and was continuously jabbing at my right eye. I experienced severe vomiting and photophobia. That night HippieHusband took me to the ER where they gave me a pile of migraine medications, none of which worked. I have never had a migraine nor has anyone in my family. Then they did a CT scan. Finally at about 7am the next morning the ER doctor let me go home with a headache that rated 7 on the richter scale. At least the vomiting was under control. He suggested that we go visit the local neurologist, which we did later that week. HippieHusband and I were sitting in this neurologist's office when she turned to us and said,

"Did they tell you about the tumor?"
HippieHusband and I looked at each other and said, "What tumor?"

Turns out the radiologist on call missed a 2cm tumor sitting at the base of my pituitary in the middle of my brain. We saw the CT scan and even us non-medically trained individuals could tell that there was something big where it shouldn't be. WTF.

Later that afternon, an MRI confirmed that I did indeed have a tumor. This tumor had started to envelope my carotid artery. Oh yeah, I think I may need that at some later date.

Luckily, we had a neurologist who was on the ball and she set up a meeting with a nearby neurosurgeon. By the time we met with the neurosurgeon my vision had started to go in the right eye. I was seeing double, both when I looked to the right and looked down at the ground. According t0 the SmallTownNeurosurgeon, GIJoe, my 4th and 6th cranial nerves were being impinged upon by the tumor. To him it wasn't a question of whether I was going to have brain surgery but where I wanted to have it. He informed us that he could do it tomorrow if we wanted. Yeah, cuz I want a SmallTownGIJoe to open my head up without further tests. Ah no thanks.

A few days later in the BigCity, we met with the MostImpressiveNeurosurgeon. That day he admitted me to hospital and a couple of days later after several labs and tests, I had brain surgery. You know, it's really really weird to say the words, "I had brain surgery." Now of course, it comes in handy if I've gapped out at meetings (can you see the drool?) or decide to mouth off because I've had enough of the academic political bullshit. People will just say, "She just never was the same after the brain surgery." Sweet.

I spent a week in the hospital, which is NOT a place to heal, recovering. The neurosurgery ward is more like a psych ward. The night I came back from ICU, I heard, down the hallway, over and over, "H-e-l-p!" and in my room, the woman beside me was groaning all night long. It was surreal. Thankfully, I had incredible and overwhelming support from HippieHusband (who was by my side the whole way), my sisters, friends, and HippieHusband's family. My sisters flew in and stayed the week with me in the hospital. I had friends come to visit me in the hospital. HippieHusband's family called both of us to check up and make sure we were doing okay and did we need anything, anything at all. In addition, HippieHusband and I received gifts, flowers, phone calls and emails, from some very supportive friends.

One thing I learned is that the US health care system is highly effective -- if you can pay for it. While our insurance is great, we will still have to pay (20%) for the cost of medical treatment, which if we were in Canada would have been free to us. Medical costs in the US are outrageous - double if not triple what it would be in Canada. And the best description of just how complicated the medical system is here in the US can be found at This American Life. So what was the total cost (to date) of the brain surgery and doctors visits...approximately $70, 000. Oh yeah, 20% of $70,000 is what?!?!?

Now I'm in recovery. The tumor was benign and and my vision has come back (phew!). Although they got a fair amount of the tumor they didn't get it all and I will likely have radiation therapy down the road. Thankfully, I am longer worried about the threat of a brain leak (so I can sneeze, blow my nose and cough again) and I'm unlikely to have adrenal insufficiency syndrome.

Prior to all this, I was an extremely high functioning, intense, driven by the desire to be a strong and productive female scientist. It will probably take at least 6 months to be back to normal. I can only do thinking work for a couple of hours at home. By thinking work, I mean reading papers, writing manuscripts, lab work, lab discussions, etc. So here I am sitting at home reflecting on the past year of my life,

1. HippieHusband and I moved to a new country to take up new jobs.
2. My father died.
3. Hernia Operation
4. Brain Surgery to remove brain tumor

finally coming to terms with who I have become. A strong and resilient woman who will find a way to be healthy, healed and whole.

Honestly, I can't wait until December 31st.

Update

Thanks again for your input and stay tuned for Part II of Slow Science.

Work-life balance

Last week, SouthernBelle, the lab tech of the PI that shares our lab space had a really rough time. She is having one of the shittiest months of her life. There must be a singularity somewhere in our lab because not only did SouthernBelle have a clusterfuck in her personal life, but mine, as most of you know, has been nothing but challenging, and our undergrad CakeBakertoAnimals, also had it rough with some family issues. The good news. For all of us, experiments are running smoothly and we're starting to get some fabulous data.

Based on a sample size of N=3 (and my own autocorrelated data of lifetime experiences), I think the concept of "work-life balance" needs revising.

I've captured this new definition in Figure 1. Work-life balance means that there is an inverse relationship between how well things are going in your personal life and your work life. So yeah, my entire study population was demolished in a fire and my supervisor has told me that I have to finish in two years, but at least my boyfriend has asked me to marry him and I just won a trip to Spain.

I hate trade-offs.

Oh sure, there are the occasional outliers when both work and your personal life have you head first in a toilet. Or the time when things are all candy apples and cotton candy and you know it so you ride that wave. But for the most part I think this inverse relationship is really true.

And as a result, this is the one and only time I can honestly say I'd rather not have work-life balance.

Slow Science gets the Shaft - Part I

This blog post will be the first of a three-part series on my ideas of slow science.

“False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.” Charles Darwin

Today, we had a seminar presentation by an "old school" scientist who told us some amazing stories about a group of organisms that he had worked on since the 1950s. It wasn't a slick powerpoint talk with fancy slides, a simple one with pictures of the different representative species. With each picture he told us about key innovations in the group, what these things eat, their ecology, morphological differences, predatory behaviour - in other words basic biology.

OldSchool is a naturalist. He doesn't make fancy models, nor do sophisticated statistics on his data. But he knows everything about the group that he works on because he has been accumulating data slowly and over the long-term. Fifty years is a heck of a long time! Instead of chasing the "sexy" and "cutting edge" questions that happen to be the hot items that year, he's a "sit and wait" scientist that lets the interesting questions arise from what he observes and experiences with these organisms in their own habitats.

OldSchool does slow science and I think that this breed of scientist is going extinct to be replace by Fast'nFurious scientists; all of whom clamber over each other to get papers in Science and Nature. Crabs in a bucket. Frankly, given the rewards, ie a scientific career that is seen as set for life, why wouldn't they?

Often to get those high impact papers, I think many choose to work on model organisms because of the cost-benefit ratio. Given the nature of the academic treadmill, we don't have the luxury of spending time with a system to acquire basic natural history questions because that takes too long. And if you choose that road in my field, it can often mean fewer publications and papers with "less impact." Ultimately leading to fewer job opportunities and less funding. And universities value scientists directly in proportion to how much money they bring in, i.e. $$$=good little scientist.

And really I am as much a party to this game as anyone. Although, I worked on an organism during my PhD, whose first name was Large and whose last name was Slow, when given the choice to work on a similar sort of organism or switch and work with a small fast one, I opted to work on a small and fast one for my postdoc. (The humour in how the size of my study species mirrors the school I'm at, is not lost on me. LargeandSlow at LargeUniversityInCanada and SmallandFast at SmallUniversity in SmallTown America.)

Well, honestly I thought - a fast and small organism will result in more publications.

I think if OldSchool were to apply for a job now (with the same qualifications he had when he started), I don't think his application would even see the light of day. And, in my opinion, that would be a huge loss to science.

The seminar today made me wonder if our focus on fast science will impact our understanding of the natural world. By fast science, I mean a few different things: what we study, how we set up experiments and for how long we run them. The focus of this blogpost will be on what we study.

Much of the work in my field has been conducted on species that are small and fast: Drosophila, annual plants, viruses, etc. These species are easily amenable to field, greenhouse and/or laboratory research. And because they have short generation times, experiments can be conducted in a timely manner (i.e., completed within the timeframe of a Masters or Ph.D). This is not to say that people don't attempt to work on LargeandSlow species, but there is a lag in the payback.

Okay so before I go all postal on the fast organism I need to demonstrate if there really a bias in what we know. Do we have equal information on organisms with vastly different generation times?

I did a quick little survey, nothing I would ever stake my scientific career on, but it yielded some interesting things. In the Wiley InterScience Life Science Search page, I did three types of word searches. The first was simply finding the total number of articles published in Wiley journals for a given organism (eg "bacteria", "Drosophila").

The graph below shows what I think we all know is obvious. Of the total number of articles written, most of our knowledge is on the following organisms: mouse, fish, and bacteria. Not surprising really that we have a strong bias toward biomedical and applied research.

But in my second search instead of just typing in the name of the organism, I used the following keywords: “bacteria and ecology”, “bacteria and evolution. ” The results were much the same. The rank order was different (fish, mouse, bacteriophage, bacteria), but the shape of the curve suggests that even in ecology and evolution, research is focused on model organisms with a short generation times. There are 136X more articles on virus ecology and evolution, than there are about a deciduous tree.

As part of the MTV generation, I understand the desire for immediate gratification. This need for immediate results and productivity is heightened under our current climate of publish or perish without any money in an unmarked grave.

But I think something is lost when what we know of the natural world is observed using a lens that is made up of organisms with “easy” life cycles.

As Charles Darwin said, “...it is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.”

Revisions on the monkey

Well, I did it. A day late, but whatever - it's off. I finished the revisions on the monkey and I've sent it off to both of my PhD supervisors.

So I'll just sit back and wait to hear from General Solution Guru, who always has excellent comments and thanks to her the work is far more sophisticated than I would have been able to do on my own.

I really hope that we can submit this baby soon. I'm dying for that Jack Daniels.