Hngggggggggg. Animal studies start this week, though I'm not on the protocol yet so I'm only allowed to sit back and watch. Everything in the protocol goes through animal welfare to make sure it's as humane as possible, but it's still sort of somber/surprising/horrifying?? and everything seeing it for the first time. Cutting the rest of this post since it involves sacrificing lab mice and details you prob don't want to hear idk.

So first, a very brief overview of our study. Some cancer cells contain pumps on the cell membrane that gets rid of drugs that target and kill cancer cells, so the purpose of our study is to find a drug that inhibits these pumps so the cell cannot flush the anti-cancer drug out when both are given together. In the mice, you give the drug and inhibitor together-- yesterday we gave an oral dose using a bulb-tipped needle that's threaded into the stomach and injected directly there, and on Friday we'll be giving an intravenous dose through the penile vein, and compare the absorption and distribution of the two routes. At certain time points (yesterday's was the pilot study, so we're looking at 2 hours after dosing for now) you sacrifice the mice and take samples of the blood and tissue to later analyze how much drug there is, if the inhibition worked, and where in the body it works best.

The mice are so cute. Tiny little things, the body is the length of my middle finger with tails the same length. Their food smells though, so sitting in the small surgery room with six people at one time got pretty suffocating since we're all wearing surgical masks and it's so hard to breathe through those.

You anesthetize the mice using a chamber filled with isoflurane gas so they fall unconscious, but the actual sacrificing and harvesting organs was sort of horrifying to see without prior explanation /o\ After the mice are knocked out, you remove them from the chamber and switch them to something like a hose that fits over just their face, like a human anesthesia mask when they undergo surgery. They're laid flat on their backs and crucified on a board with tacks holding each of the four limbs to the sides. Their paws crack when you drive the nail through /o\ Then you cut open the skin across their stomach, straight up and then across so you can move the organs out of the way. All the while, the mouse is still alive, just unconscious, but its abdomen is splayed open and the heart's still pumping, which it needs to be pumping because the first thing we draw up is the blood. Immediately after, the mouse is killed through cervical dislocation, which is the fastest way because the spine is snapped and the animal is still asleep the entire time. Then one by one remove the organs: heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, spleen, intestines, fat, muscle, brain. The skull is cut open with a pair a scissors, snapping like hard plastic. All the samples are put on dry ice to be transported later, and repeated for how many mice are being tested. Yesterday we had six mice, on Friday we'll have seven.

All I did was stand and watch, operate the anesthesia, and a single blood draw, but I can't imagine doing this as my main project. It's so different from high school dissections of cats and pigs and humans because they're already dead-- with lab mice, you're also doing the killing and I just. Will probably take a long time getting used to it. I can do everything else just fine, it's just the "I'm sorry" and then snapping spines )8

IT SURE WAS AN EXPERIENCE THOUGH.