I was a hardcore scientific P mother effing hD grad student today.

Good evening ladies and gentleman,

Today I witnessed eight, yes, eight, soft furry happy little mice, get mercilessly slaughtered. The post-doc who was by my side did not euthanize them with CO2 as per normal, no, she pulled on their heads and asses simultaneously until you heard all the bones break in their neck - effectively called, cervical dislocation.

She then made the smallest incision on their back. Innocent and harmless enough, I was like, "oh gee this isn't really so bad. There isn't even any blood."

Then, as if opening a bag of frito fucking lays, (I kid you not) placed her fingers on either side of the hole, and ripped its skin off its body.

Holy christ, this now very dead mouse with a very broken neck is laying in front of me with no skin, its like, this sack of organs with feet. Some other MD in the lab came over and was like, oh um, can I have your intestine?

So now instead of contained body parts, its messy body parts. But even better, these messy organs are still all attached, like those Christmas rings we made out of construction paper as kids, except you know, MADE OUT OF GUTS, WARM GUTS THAT ARE STILL TWITCHING - all because this guy came and helped himself to our entrails and made our neat packaged skinless mice turn into what could be passed off as meat lasagna.

So now when Bo, the post doc, picks up the mouse its literally inside out with all of its organs just a'flappin in the breeze-- its head is dangling and it's tongue is hanging out of its mouth, from the cervical dislocation of course. Ugh, blood all over the paper towels, all over her gloves. ugh. ugh. ugh. and its still twitching.

Oh shit then she ripped its legs off, explaining it was too slow to use scissors. She put the legs in a petri dish and slid them towards me bar style. She instructed me to remove all the tissue and clean the bone so I could then, naturally, cut the bones up and blow out their bone marrow. But I shouldn't forget to cut the feet off first.

Yeah of course I don't mind cutting off their feet because I'm really not about to vomit everywhere.

Yeah, 8 fucking mice equals way too many legs and way too many little furry mice feet that I snipped off today. Oh shit. And DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THAT BONE MARROW !?!?!? Yeah, went in the autoclave trash, because you know, today was just for practice.

(She did need to harvest spleens, it wasn't all waste).

The best part wasn't the crunching of the breaking neck, or the peritoneal cavity being harvested for fall fixings, it was the grad students who were in and out of our room laughing at my green face and teary eyes, giving me the ol' punch on the shoulder because before no time that will be me... me who will be ripping mice apart without compunction, and simultaneously contemplating hamburgers for dinner.


My second day in lab was a little overwhelming to say the least. On my way out I stopped for a quick 45 min chat with my PI who advised me mice were easier to kill the C. elegans because they were bigger, and if I was having that much trouble then I could look at the mice under the microscope whilst killing ensued - for more familiar killing grounds of course. Ha. Ha. Ha.