Friday, March 16, 2007

Salivating madmen

Do you ever take a moment to sit back, look at your life and ask ‘How the hell did I get here?’. That’s the situation I found myself in the last few days. I’ve been spending time in a room in a tower of the hospital, analyzing the spit I’ve collected from crazy people. Yes, spit.

Well, in most cases. In others, it seems people don’t seem to know the difference between saliva and mucus from your nose, and I find myself dealing with a disgusting, useless, lump of green slime in a tube that some old man thought that he was contributing to science. I’ll spare you the details about the smell but summarize it, instead, with a simple image: morning-breath in a bottle.

Why am I doing this, you ask? Well for those that don’t know, I’m working on a study where we are looking at stress hormones in people with mood disorders. So we’re looking at hormone levels in saliva, as a proxy for what’s going on in someone’s bloodstream. Largely, I’ve taught myself how to design this study and am refining it gradually through trial and error. We are coming to the end of one part of the project, so our visiting grad student and I are doing a mad 7-day saliva-analysis marathon. Good times!

There is a part of me that is worried: will I eventually become desensitized to other people’s saliva, if I keep at this job long enough? Does that happen to medical technologists that analyze urine and feces day in and day out? At my last job, I had to take frozen newborn mice and cut the tails (sometimes a leg, if the tail was not salvageable!) off for analyzing what genes they were carrying. When I began, this revolted me so much I couldn’t eat lunch, but with time I didn’t flinch and just saw it as part of my job. Which probably means the answer to my question is ‘yes’.

In our next study, we plan to start looking at the hormones people’s hair. Me thinks that won’t be so bad, in comparison …

|