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Something wonderful happened to me this morning. First off, I was able to sleep in for some odd reason. (8:00 is sleeping in for me, I have a body clock that is entirely wrong for a 19 year old) When I did wake up I felt entirely rested. My head wasn’t all foggy and yucky and my body didn’t feel like it consisted of bags of sand. AND, best of all I could breathe totally normally. My lungs didn’t feel like they were stuck to the inside of my ribcage, nor was there the usual elephant sitting on my chest. I was literally able to just wake up, get up, and eat breakfast. Usually in the mornings my lungs are all gnarled from the loads of uncoughed coughs during the night.
OK, I can sense a good day in the works, and maybe some good lungs for awhile! I better make the most of it today, too bad it’s still cold out! ALSO, did I tell you that I AM DONE WORK?? Yep, two beautiful weeks off before I go back to university town, and a whole other week before school starts. Maybe that’s why I got such a good rest last night…
I’m breathing much more easily now, hooray for that. This is my last week of work and although I really loved doing research this summer, I’ll be glad to have some time off before school starts. I had a little talk with my supervisor today (who I consider to be brilliant and is a very well-respected researcher) about what I want to do with my career.
I’ve been waffling a bit about that this summer. Because while I’ve wanted to be a doctor for a long long time, I was getting slightly turned off by the arduous admission process and the cost of medical school. I was really intrigued by a career in genetic counselling, which requires an MSc but is a fascinating and quickly growing field. I’m happy to say though, that I am back on track and I’m going full steam ahead for the MD. Deep down I know that I really really want it and I can work hard. The only question is though, because I’m such a sucker for knowledge and because I want to keep my options for research and teaching open, whether I want to do a PhD in conjunction with this. I realize I’m condemned to be a student in perpetuity but if you didn’t notice, it suits me and I like it 
My supervisor told me that I should be aiming high and to just go for it. I’m pretty sure those words were what boosted my confidence so much and you can bet I was grinning hard when I came out of his office. A good day! Hopefully I’ll be able to remember this in December when I’m banging my head against the wall and I’m feeling a little depleted.
It was tough! The actual content part was pretty good and I’m happy with the way I presented it. I got some good questions too, which means people were listening.
But talking for ten minutes while you are having trouble breathing is hard. I was really struggling. I had to stop talking almost at every slide and take a few breaths because I wasn’t able to breathe out while I was talking and air was just piling up in my lungs. Yuck, not a nice feeling. And I was trying to remain composed which was also very difficult. I have a feeling people just thought I was very nervous, which I wasn’t really.
Afterward, my supervisor gave me a thumbs up and said teasingly ”remembering to breathe is always a good idear Danielle” (he’s English). I told him it wasn’t that I didn’t remember so much as I couldn’t do it!
I would just like to crash for a bit now!!
Like many seasoned asthmatics, I often get pretty tight without noticing it or without being too bothered by it. I can go about my business as usual, but there’s always one thing that makes me notice how I’m actually breathing: eating. Especially, as it so happens, my morning bowl of cereal. (I guess I’m just more normally tight in the mornings?)
Sometimes I will get myself a bowl of cereal (I’m into mini-wheats these days) and halfway through realize that I am nearly bent in half over the breakfast table and using my accessory muscles to breathe. I’ll sometimes notice that I have to stop chewing to try and take a breath. And, I usually don’t feel like finishing when this happens. Only then will I say to myself “Um, I guess I actually *am* very tight over here” and only then will I feel like doing something about it. Go figure.
If you’re too tight to eat but don’t notice until you try to eat, that’s not good. On the other hand I start to think that oh well if you don’t feel bad then you must not be doing badly so it’s a non-issue. But somehow that sounds slightly off. Peak flow meters are a very good thing in this regard, forget what my title says.
As you can probably tell from this post, I’m still having trouble with the lungs. Doubled-up pulmicort, do your thing! My presentation at the university is today. I’m sure I’ll be fine, I’ve practiced it several times in front of my colleagues. I just hope talking for 10 minutes doesn’t have the same effect as cereal-eating for me today.
Tomorrow is Canada day, so it’s a holiday! I’m happy to have a day off. I’m making lots of progress in my research project, I’ve gone through about 200 samples so far. What I do with them is extract the DNA from the mouthwash samples (this is really gross when you get bits of food or discoloured samples) then I amplify the gene I want to look at, then sequence it. The sequence pops up on our computer and I can easily spot mutations. I love my job and I’m pretty thrilled to be involved in research. However, working in a lab you are bound to encounter some interesting personalities. My colleagues and I joke that we could create a whole TV series based on the people in our lab. My biggest issue is unwanted attention from a certain fellow student (who hopefully doesn’t read random asthma blogs) Please, anybody have any tips on fending off boys you work in a small space with???
Breathing-wise, I’m good. I was paying for my bike ride yesterday but I’m over that today. I have a funny story about my bike ride. My sister and I rode a fair distance to procure ourselves some bubble tea. On our way back home, we were riding on a path through a park, it looked pretty deserted so my sister decided to do her infamous T-Rex imitation. She was making dino noises and had her hands in T-rex formation, all the while pedaling along. She gets really into it and it makes me lose it every time, I was killing myself laughing. All of a sudden her bike started to wobble seeing as she wasn’t holding on, and she exclaimed “Ah! I’m veering off the pathway!” And veer off the pathway she did, tumbling onto the grass… right at the feet of some poor lady sitting on a bench who had witnessed the whole debacle! Well when my sister realized this she hopped right back onto her bike and rode away, laughing very hard. I completely lost it at this point and tried to ride up to her but I was laughing too hard. I couldn’t breathe but I couldn’t stop laughing. Isn’t that the worst feeling ever? It brings back bad memories of being tickled to death by older cousins when I was a kid. ”KJ…. stop…. being funny. Can’t… breathe!” That’s what I tried to say to her, and I could tell she felt bad but neither of us could stop laughing. Anyway, it was utterly silly. This is a perfect example of how you can cause your very own asthma attack by sheer tomfoolery. Thankfully I recovered after a short break on the grass and rode merrily on home. I still had fun : )
The weather is stormy outside but I hope that the it behaves tomorrow because I have a full day planned in the SUN. Look for my (educational) Canada day post tomorrow morning before I head out!
I’m bored and starting to feel like a slacker and since I don’t feel like poo anymore I would really like to go to work today. If I worked anywhere else, I probably wouldn’t think twice about it. I still have a wicked cough though and that’s the problem. I mean, a hospital is a very confined space, especially for the inpatients and I need to think about the fact that I share a cafeteria and elevator with oncology and transplant patients and all kinds of kids for whom this sort of infection would be catastrophic. I mean, it’s not like I’m serving them lunch or wiping their noses or anything but STILL. You can never be too careful when these things spread so readily. The other thing is that bacteria have DNA too and say if I coughed over my reaction and then accidentally amplified some bacterial DNA, or even my own DNA from my aerosolized saliva (ew, I know), my results would be totally screwed. Yes, that actually is a real concern. Damn science, why you gotta be so finicky??
Anyway, if I got my mom to drop me off, then used the staff basement entrance, wore a nerdy surgical mask while experimentin’ and used hand sanitizer ten times an hour, went outside for lunch instead of to the cafeteria and then exited again by the basement entrance, I could justify going in today, and I might just get some work done. I’ll see if my mom says yes.
I learned today that I will be getting authorship on the paper that will come out on my research project!! Of course it’s totally appropriate because I am doing all of the lab work and a good deal of the analysis, but I just can’t believe I’m going to be a published researcher at 19! Eeeeeeeeeee!
Much of what I am working on this summer involves research around the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes. These code (as you may have guessed) for the antigens present on cell surfaces and regulate the body’s immune responses. So, it makes sense that there would be an allergic asthma connection. I’m not working on asthma at all, but my project probably would bore you to death so I’m not going there.
Asthma is described as a polygenic condition. This means that many genes affect the manifestation of the disease, as opposed to a single one such as in cystic fibrosis. Further, environmental factors will affect the expression of the genes an individual has inherited. That’s why this thing is so hard to figure out! Over 25 genes have been shown to be associated with asthma and many more are suspected of such.
There are several HLA genes (all on chromosome six if you are wondering) but the ones found to be associated with asthma are HLA-DRB1, HLA-DQA1 and HLA-DQB1. Another cool thing about HLA genes is that they are HUGELY variable (polymorphic), which really isn’t seen anywhere else in the genome. There is a huge number of versions of each gene that it is possible to inherit. What I’m trying to get at here is to give you an idea of all the possible ways a person can inherit a predisposition to asthma and atopy. The possibilities seem endless. And if you couple that with environmental exposure, it’s easy to see how we have this huge asthma spectrum. It’s sort of mind-boggling. The question now is how to we untangle this whole genetic mess? The fact that we have identified some genes is amazing, do you think we will ever get to the point where we can genotype someone and reliably determine what their risk for asthma is?
If you would like to read about this in even more technical terms, see this article.
I love to write about medicine in scientific jargon, but also feel like this type of post might be a bit much. At the same time, I’m paranoid about all the stuff I know I’ve left out. So please just humour me as I try to give my scientific brain a little exercise. Comments, impressions, and feedback are appreciated as well, as always.
There was A LOT of snow in the mountains. So, we didn’t get to do the ridge we had picked but instead hiked up an old trail to an awesome ancient dried up riverbed. Of course my dad the geologist was full of facts. It was hard on the lungulars in that I was wheezing and huffing, but I still made it the whole way so I’m actually very happy.
Tomorrow I start work. I haven’t talked about it much yet, but I’ll be working in a molecular biology clinical/research lab for the summer. I will be taking up a research project, but I still have no idea about what it will entail. I have a feeling it will take my boss a few days to get it together anyway. I worked there last summer and I loved the atmosphere as everyone there was so intelligent and really generous with their time when it came to helping me out. I’m really looking forward to it. Still, there is the side of being tied to a nine-to-five job which I kind of resent. But for me to have a job where I will actively be using my knowledge learned at school while not having the stress of school AND while being paid is pretty close to a miracle. Yay!
