Rank with the smell of blood

I've wanted to, I've wanted to
Experiment for bio gain
And finally, I did it true
And cut out that poor creature's brain

I finally did it! The day I've been waiting for for the past two weeks...I finally did my dissection today. There it was, like poetry: three rats, one sarah, one bottle of halothane, and various instrumentation.

I realize that this may all sound quite cold and calculated, but what you have to understand is that my excitement stems not from the cold-blooded killing so much as it is my eagerness to learn more about epilpsy and neurology. It's a sad fact that in order for research into treatments for epilepsy to be developed, sacrifices need to be made. Which is not to say that I don't feel bad about killing the rats...but the procedure (removed from all emotion and guilt) is humane and ethical, and the prospect of doing something useful is exciting.

First things first; I gassed the first rat to anaesthetise him, then chopped off its head with a guillotine (carefully making sure to trap the severed body in a yellow biohazard bag to ensure it didn't make a mess when spinal reflexes cause it to jump around after decapitation. Took the head and after cutting out fur and muscle, I peeled back the bone layer of the skull, and then the brain's membrane, and excised the brain itself.

From there, I did some cutting to leave two chunks, each which contained one hemisphere's section of the hippocampus. Then the slicing began, in a big machine with a vibrating razor that cut nice slices, each 500 microns thick.

I'm not allowed to do anything with my slices yet, because I'm just supposed to be practicing, but eventually I'll be able to do voltage/current recordings on them.

Very cool day. Learned a lot, and felt a lot worse about killing the animals than I thought I would. Truth be told, I generally don't like animals unless they're cute and clean and quiet, which leaves me few options. And while rats are none of these things...it's funny how you can feel for a rodent.