La Recherche :-)

Today, when I found my way to work and finished berating myself for getting lost and showing up late, I realized that arrive between 8-9 actually means meander in with a cup of coffee between 10 and 11. In the mean time, I learned a very important life skill: the one professor who was already there taught Christabel and I how to make coffee, and yes I didn't know how to do that before. When Muriel arrived, I got into more detail about my work. I'm going to be helping to design a study on Multiple Sclerosis (Christabel is working on Age Linked Macular Degeneration) and vision (contrast sensitivity) that hopefully will lead to a new tool for early diagnosis. I am generally unable to be remotely useful if I don't understand practically everything about a topic however, and I have pretty much no real neuroscience background yet, so I've taken out the textbooks on Vision Neuroscience and clinical Neuropsychology and probably will not be going out into the city much for the next few days. I started by reading about the mechanism of disease in Multiple Sclerosis, and though at first I had to look up every other term I read, once I did, all the interconnections became so fascinating and the reading became really fun. I had just gotten into it when it was time for lunch, and though I was tempted to skip it, I knew that espresso coffee and no food were not a good mix. After lunch I only had a few minutes to continue reading before we went to see the opthamologist downtown in preparation for running clinical experiments. The slightly awkward little Vietnamese doctor introduced us to everyone in the office and it was a bit funny to notice that the petite, giggly woman whose phone kept going off was the boss of 6 abnormally tall, big male medical students and fellows. She kept trying to speak in English even though I had a much easier time understanding her French than her English and she also continuously spoke of us "practicing French" as she spoke English. Muriel and the opthamologist went through the procedures for the established experiments in detail and they told Christabel and me which days we should come in to the hospital. I was getting a bit of a sore throat at this point though, and was freaking out that I might be getting sick again, so I wasn't paying as much attention. One of the medical students (the one that Muriel and the opthamologist referred to as the handsomest and smartest one while smiling at Christabel and me) said that if my throat didn't get better soon, he would check it out, which is quite a relief because I have no intention of actually going to a doctor while I'm here. I came and home and fell asleep for 6 hours, but now I'm feeling a bit better, and hopefully I'll be fine. The weather is still perfect and my job is really fun, though it's quite amazing how inefficient I feel. Tomorrow I go to the hospital very early to do some control group experiments and get accustomed to working at a hospital and this weekend I'm off to Paris :-)