I Don't Know How to Feel About This

 Hello everyone! My mom suggested I talk about what I did in lab today since it was… interesting? Disturbing? Strange? Nauseating? I don’t know what to say about it, since it was definitely a new experience, but one that weirded me out for the rest of the day. I don’t know how I feel.

Today was my brain extraction training.

Now, this sounds like it would be something nice and simple, right? You just get the brains out of whatever they’re in, right?

Yeah, no.

Akeela, the post-doc who agreed to train me, brought five live mice that we had to kill so I could see the whole process.

Okay, so I’ll admit, I was more than a little excited when I saw that I was going to learn the whole process. It was a new skill, and it involved science, so of course I was excited even if the process was more than a little morbid. Watching Akeela do the first one was a lot of fun. We were using an Iso-Chamber to make the mice pass out (it suppresses their respiratory functions and acts as a sort of anesthesia and has been used for stuff like surgery) and had to watch as they tried to escape to find a more oxygen filled area. Akeela, once the mouse was out, then took them and laid them out in a way so that the paws were out of the way, pinched the neck, and then pulled on the base of the tail to kill it. Basically doing this makes it so that you pop the spinal chord out of place in a way that kills the mouse instantly. You can feel it pop under your fingers and sometimes you can hear it too.

I was fine up until this point, excited even.

And then she decapitated the mouse. There was surprisingly little blood, and it wasn’t honestly that disturbing to watch her cut open and peel back the skin to expose the brain case. I don’t know why it wasn’t so bad, maybe because I was removed from the situation? Who knows. Anyways, it was super cool to see how she cracked the skull open like a pistachio. She had the brain out of the head and into the dry ice tub within a couple of minutes. It was really quick. Sara went next to show a different technique (Akeela was using one where you found the pinpoint between all the brain case bone fusion lines and cracked it open from there while Sara cut along the midline of the fused areas since you can see the line).

And then it was my turn. The mouse was warm as I decapitated it and it weirded me out, but I wanted to do it right, so I just moved on. My science brain took over for the most part, I think, since I just repliecated what I’d seen. It was really, really hard though. To take out the brain you must have very still hands (strike one for my shaky hands) and good fine motor skills (strike two, since I only have drawing motor skills). I thankfully didn’t do too much damage, and I even got the bulbs towards the front out with the ones I did, which can be tricky. You had to scoop the brain out with a mini chemistry spatula which has to be done little by little so you don’t tear up the bottom.

Anyways, by the time my first try was on dry ice, my hands were shaking and I had to take a little walk around the lab to get the wiggles out (I was half-squatting and paying very close attention for the whole ten minutes that I spent extracting (which was twice the amount that an expert can take by the way). My second try went a lot smoother since I knew holding the face of the mouse was a lot easier with my fingers than the tweezers (and it’s less likely to burst an eyeball—don’t ask), and I knew what to do to make the extraction with the spatula go faster. I think it came out better too, even if I messed up by putting the brain on the paper towel before the dry ice (which means some of it might have liquidated onto the paper). Overall, great learning experience. We finished the last mouse off by having Akeela show us how she did it again to solidify the steps and then cleaned up.

See I was fine with everything as long as I was in the lab. I blame science brain.

However, that changed when I got home and realized I had to eat food. And that’s kind of when it sank in that I had just helped to kill/killed five animals today.

I didn’t eat meat for lunch and I’ve been kind of… I wouldn’t say traumatized, but maybe processing? Like, the mice that we used were made for science and the brains are important for research and training. I’m all for that, but today has been odd. I can still feel the mouse head in my hand and how warm the body was when I was working with it. And I can visualize everything as well--very, very clearly.

I’ll have to do this again in the future, though it is more likely that I’ll just get the leftovers from a different experiment and just take the brain from a not recently deceased animal.

So yeah, good learning experience, but one that still has me confused and reeling. Mom says it was worth sharing and writing down for reference in the future—something to look back and reflect on.

Bye.