This morning, I made an appointment to get my neck/back chiropractored on Wednesday. Wednesday was the earliest day they could see me, I would’ve liked to get in sooner. See, I didn’t exactly sleep last night. I nabbed a few 20 minute naps in between contorting in pain and unsuccesfully trying to cry myself to sleep. Twice. Dr. Boyfriend woke up and massaged my poor broken body and held me while I wallowed in pain, misery, tiredness and self-pity at 3 AM.

This will be my 4th trip to the chiropractor since joining the Synchrotron experimenters one and a half weeks ago.

Got an appointment to see my GP tomorrow. Hopefully he’ll give me a prescription for muscle relaxers, so that I may sleep better – or at all. This will be very important when it comes time to run the beamline on the synchrotron, since we operate 24/7 in 12 hour shifts. Tried to get an appointent at university health services but they were all filled up with sickly undergrads. The wait at urgent care was 4-5 hours, and, though they offered to put me in the queue, they heavily recommended taking a butload of NSAIDs instead. Their exact words were “if you choose to wait, you’ll probably get H1N1.” I said “no thank you,” and left. Besides swine flu, the thought of sitting for 4 hours made me want to committ supuku.

And I’m back in lab. Much of the right side of my body from my upper neck down to my hip is numb from the irritation and swelling caused by the incessant muscle spasms. It’s kinda like a temporary relief, as long as I don’t try to move too much. Like turn my head more than 20 degrees.

*sneers at potentiostat*

Damn that instrument. Actually, to be technical, it’s not the potentiostat itself that works me over for the worse, its the custom electrochemical devices with their finicky alignment, brittle leads, and tiny screws, and having to set them up in the goddamn hood. I hate those things. Not to mention, stuff doesn’t work as nicely as it does in my regular glass cell, despite their fancy-cool custom machined-ness. Seriously, I get the best results in a 20-cent glass vial using three electrodes which I have expertly bundled together with parafin wax. Science….

Apart from the searing pain, working on the weekend isn’t all that bad. By the second consecutive weekend in lab, working 7 days a week feels totally normal. Plus, I work a slighter schedule: usually only about 6 hours, compared to the 10-12 hours on weekdays.

I’m currently synthesizing my back-up samples, it’s getting down to the wire. On a side note, tetrachloroplatinate is a pretty, pretty platinum salt. A 0.1M  aqueous solution is a deep sunset orange.