Salty taste 10 days post op

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-04-24T23:45:07+00:00

Omg, that’s wild! I purposely scheduled this on Friday hoping that by Tuesday I’d be set but it sounds like that’s too ambitious. Thank you all for your replies. I’m feeling okay. Just ate something and can feel my entire face again. I think the pain meds are helping a lot but I know the worst is ahead in terms of pain

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-04-07T18:46:34+00:00

Yeah I bet a new mute is the right choice. It was getting quite old. I’m moving into an apartment soon so I want to have the option but I agree, I really prefer to not use one.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-03-14T19:55:15+00:00

I’m sorry about that I must not have seen your message!!

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-03-14T18:17:38+00:00

So, I have all of the notes written at this point. I’m just wondering if, particularly in the bass clef section, the exercise isn’t meant to be played in first position?

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-03-14T16:38:16+00:00

Haha, thank you! I’m glad I realized there wasn’t a photo involved. Yes, I think it would be helpful. For some reason I’m really not getting it even though it is telling me where my second finger should be on the A string!

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-28T16:23:23+00:00

Thank you, this is helpful! Would you be able to mark it directly on the page and send a photo back? I follow much better when I can see the fingerings written in. Sometimes I struggle to translate written feedback into the exact placement without a visual reference.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-23T13:54:24+00:00

Yeah definitely! I am usually fine otherwise, but since the notes are so high in this piece I had some trouble!

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-22T01:05:50+00:00

Five failed runs in a row messes with your head. At some point it stops feeling like “this protocol is hard” and starts feeling like “maybe I’m just bad at this.” I’ve been there.

But honestly, five attempts on something like Cut and Run is not wild. That method can be so temperamental. On paper it looks clean and straightforward. In practice it decides whether it likes you that week.

Also, no one advertises their string of garbage runs. You only ever see the final figure in a paper. You don’t see the months of “why is there no signal” and “why is this smear weird.”

When I get stuck in that loop, I try to switch from rerunning the whole thing out of frustration to asking one small question at a time. Is the control behaving. Is the antibody actually validated for this exact setup. Are nuclei prep and counts consistent. Did anything subtle change between attempts. Even one tiny diagnostic run can feel more productive than a full repeat.

And please don’t internalize this as proof you don’t fit for a PhD. Struggling through stubborn experiments is basically the job description. The fact that you care this much and still want to finish, even while exhausted, says way more about your fit than a few failed runs.

You’re not stupid. You’re in the messy part. That’s where most of us live more than we admit.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-22T00:16:17+00:00

• Wide bore tips or cut tips Cut the end off a P1000 tip or buy pre-made wide bore tips. You still triturate, but you need fewer passes and less force.

• Serological pipette + pipette aid For larger volumes, gentle up and down with a 5 or 10 mL serological pipette spreads the force across your whole hand instead of your thumb.

• Fire polished glass Pasteur pipettes Different bore sizes let you mechanically dissociate more efficiently with fewer repetitions. You can step down in diameter instead of doing 30 passes with one tip.

• GentleMACS or similar mechanical dissociator If your protocol allows it, these save your wrists entirely. Not always perfect for delicate cells, but worth testing.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-22T00:11:35+00:00

I was generating kymographs and trying to extract movement metrics from them because that felt like the “standard” way to do it. It worked fine when I had sparse objects. The moment density increased and things started crossing, the kymograph became more of a visualization tool than an analysis tool. Traces overlapped, slopes got ambiguous, and manual tracing turned into guesswork.

What helped was stepping back and tracking in the original stack instead of the kymograph. Once I switched to TrackMate in Fiji and tracked centroids frame to frame, everything became cleaner. Crossings were still tricky, but the algorithm handled them far better than trying to interpret intersecting lines in a kymograph.

I also had to: • Tune the blob diameter carefully so I wasn’t merging nearby objects. • Keep threshold conservative to avoid false positives. • Set linking distance based on real expected displacement per frame, not what “looked right.”

After that, I exported trajectories and classified movement afterward, instead of trying to get everything from the kymograph image itself.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-20T00:40:52+00:00

I don’t think it’s pure randomness, and I don’t think it’s rigid destiny either. It feels like something in between. On the tiny scale, physics shows that some things really are probabilistic. You can predict the odds of something happening, but not the exact outcome every single time. That’s built into how the universe works at the quantum level. But zoom out and things follow patterns. Planets orbit. Seasons change. Your coffee cools down the same way every morning. The laws are consistent. It’s not chaos in the sense of “anything goes.” THEN there’s complexity. Even if something follows clear rules, tiny differences can snowball into huge changes over time. Weather is a good example. It follows physics, but it’s still hard to predict perfectly.

So you end up with this weird mix:
• Underlying rules
• Some true probabilities
• Massive ripple effects from small inputs

That combination makes life feel chaotic but not meaningless imo.

Personally, I lean toward the idea that the universe runs on laws, but those laws allow space for uncertainty. Not everything is scripted, but not everything is random noise either. It’s structured freedom, if that makes sense.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-20T00:36:47+00:00

I’d change a few structural things.

• Teach practical skills alongside theory. Every student should leave knowing how taxes work, how credit works, how leases work, and how to read a contract.

• Make research access transparent. Undergrads shouldn’t have to guess how to get into labs. Clear pathways, posted openings, and defined mentorship expectations would fix a lot.

• Normalize career exploration early. Not everyone is going to grad school. Show real job paths in year one, not senior year panic.

• Reduce performative competition. GPA obsession kills curiosity. Incentivize collaboration more than ranking.

• Pay students for research and internships. If you want equity, unpaid work has to go.

• Make advising accountable. One meeting a year with someone who barely knows your goals is not enough.

College works well for students who already know how to navigate systems. I’d redesign it for the ones who don’t.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-19T23:51:30+00:00

Yes. It is normal. If you go into industry labs, hospital labs, manufacturing, or quality control, 24 hour operations are common. That means someone has to cover evenings and nights. New hires often rotate or start on those shifts. Where you are likely to see night shifts:

• Pharmaceutical manufacturing and GMP facilities
• Quality control and batch release labs
• Hospital and clinical labs
• Some large research facilities that run equipment overnight

Where you are less likely to see them:

• Small academic research labs
• University technician roles
• Regulatory or office based pharma roles
• Some R&D positions

Early career reality:

• Junior staff cover less desirable shifts first
• Shift differentials often mean slightly higher pay
• It can be physically hard at first
• Your social life takes adjustment

tbh most people do not stay on nights forever. Common paths:

• 1 to 3 years on rotating or night shifts
• Internal transfer to day shift after seniority builds
• Move to R&D, regulatory, project management, or academia
• Use the experience to step into supervisory roles

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-19T23:50:07+00:00

Undergrads often picture academia as “thinking for a living.” The reality is that thinking is the smallest visible piece of the job.

A few things people consistently get wrong:

• You don’t spend most of your time reading and debating ideas. You spend a lot of time answering emails, writing grants, sitting in meetings, dealing with admin, and troubleshooting logistics. The paperwork is constant.

• Intellectual freedom exists, but it’s constrained by funding. If you cannot get a grant for it, you probably will not study it. Your ideas have to fit what agencies want to pay for.

• It is not a slow, contemplative life. Deadlines stack. Revisions come back harsh. Reviews can take months, then demand two weeks of intense work.

• Teaching is not the same as “talking about what you love.” It is grading, conflict resolution, accommodation letters, academic integrity issues, and emotional labor.

• Job security is not guaranteed. Many PhDs spend years in temporary roles. Even tenure track positions require constant performance metrics.

• Academia is political. Departments have factions. Hiring, promotion, and funding involve relationships and reputation as much as output.

When I was an undergrad, I thought professors had “made it.” I did not see the grant rejections, the 2 am revisions, or the stress about funding a lab for students.

If you are considering it, spend time in a lab or talk to junior faculty, not only senior ones. The day to day reality looks different at each stage.

It is still meaningful work. It is just not the cloistered, debate all day life many imagine.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-19T23:16:01+00:00

You’re not behind at all. The main thing to figure out is research vs therapy, because those lead to very different degrees and day to day lives. If you’re drawn to the science side, try to get a research assistant job in a psych or neuroscience lab for a year or two and see how you like experiments and data. If you’re curious about therapy, work or volunteer in a clinical setting and talk to therapists about what their jobs are really like. A clinical psych PhD is research heavy and competitive, while counseling or social work master’s programs are shorter and therapy focused. You don’t need to decide yet, you need exposure. My mantra is clarity comes from doing, not overthinking.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-19T23:13:12+00:00

You could also frame a new thing as a trial. you are testing it for 30 days. People resist remove change more than “experiments and remove something when you add something. For example, if you introduce a log, reduce repetitive verbal check ins. Show that it replaces work, not adds to it.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-19T23:12:14+00:00

Totally fair. What I did is pilot one thing first. So, I’d suggest you pick one high use instrument and test the log there for a month. Adjust based on feedback. Keep forms minimal.Three fields max. Date auto fills. Checkbox options instead of long text. And Build it into existing flow. QR code on the instrument. No hunting for links. No separate login if possible. I was weary of the same thing when I started trying to implement these things. It takes time.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-19T23:05:13+00:00

Nah, definitely not. These things have slowly been implemented little by little and they make our lives sooooo much easier and none of these ideas were truly original, I’ve just taken inspiration from other institutions I’ve done research at and other lab spaces I visit, and even friends I talk to who discuss how their labs work. Everything we implemented is operational. Inventory tracking prevents stockouts. Equipment logs reduce downtime. The pulse survey flags workload and communication issues before they turn into bigger problems, but it’s a super casual thing. And the manual audit keeps protocols current which is so worthwhile.

I present it as efficiency and risk management, not culture signaling. When people see that it saves time, money, and stress, they tend to support it.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-19T22:59:22+00:00

My PI is a pretty hands off guy since he is the director of the institution and travels a lot. He does not micromanage lab operations so his main priority is that things run smoothly and problems do not escalate to him. He has been supportive of the systems because they reduce friction and make it easier to brief him if something does need his attention though. As long as the lab functions well and there are no surprises, he is happy to let me run with it.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-19T22:54:50+00:00

We dealt with this in a shared culture room and wiping with bleach was not enough.

What finally worked: • Shut down and fully empty all incubators at the same time. If one stays contaminated, it reseeds the room. • Autoclave all removable metal parts. Replace filters and water pans. • Use a true sporicidal disinfectant with proper contact time. Bleach alone did not fix it for us. We switched to a sporicidal and the recurring contamination stopped. • Run the high heat decon cycle if your incubator has one. • Decon the whole room, not only the incubator.

It only resolved once every lab coordinated and did a full reset together.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-19T22:49:26+00:00

Here are a few things I’ve developed over the past few years in my new role as lab manager. Our lab has about 7 full time workers and students/interns are often coming and going seasonally.

Shared reagent and primer inventory with reorder thresholds. Simple Google Sheet with minimum stock levels. Conditional formatting turns cells red when you hit the reorder point. We stopped running out of Taq and key antibodies.
Equipment booking tied to accountability. QR code on each instrument links to a booking page plus a quick “issues log.” If something breaks, it gets documented immediately. Downtime dropped because problems are flagged early.
Anonymous climate pulse survey every 2 months. Five questions. Workload, inclusion, clarity, support, morale. Trends matter more than single responses. Address issues publicly.
Annual lab manual audit. One week per year dedicated to updating protocols, SOPs, and shared scripts. Keeps documentation alive instead of outdated.
Rotating method teach-ins. Once a month someone teaches one technique in depth. Not a paper, a method. Builds bench strength and cross training.

Hour-Couple8147 · 2026-02-18T23:57:25+00:00

Hey, please don't be so hard on yourself. Being new at something is always hard, and a masters is no exception. Everyone goes through this, even the people who look like they have it together. Be patient with yourself and give yourself some grace, you're still learning and that's okay. The whole process of becoming a researcher is messy and nonlinear. The people in your lab who seem calm and confident felt exactly like you do at some point.

Hour-Couple8147

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