Day 43.

It has been 43 days since i first arrived in Adelaide.

Today i was having one of my emo moods again in the morning.

No this isnt a love story, ill leave that topic for now. Its about my decisions for the future. I have been thinking alot lately about what im going to do after next year. I have always wanted to do medicine and would be my ultimate dream to be accepted into a graduate programme.

But the thing is, I dont feel i have enough brain juice to do it. I have always doubted myself in this aspect. Im struggling for this final year in biomed doing double majors. And i suppose it will only get harder in med school, that is if i can get in.

Then theres the issue about the amount of time i spend, graduating only at the age of 25/26. Ill be 3 years behind my friends. Then theres the expenses etc etc.

Most importantly, theres the admittance process, in which i need a degree of good quality(second upper or better), high GAMSAT scores, interviews etc, and a very illustrious cv of which my greatest achievement was probably......oh wait , i have NONE.

So as i was thinking about all of this on my morning bus ride to uni with my characteristic blank stare into nothing.(besides checking out the cute girl a few seats infront of me ocassionaly. She super jual mahal and smokes . What a turn off. )

ok back to the story...

As the bus approached one of its popular stops on the north terrace, near the convention centre and casino, an elderly man came abroad.

Instinctively i asked him wheather he wanted my seat. He politely said no, and told me that he wasnt going far. So i remained seated and continued staring out the window. Suddenly he asked me " So are you off to Uni?"

I said yes. He then asked me what i was studying and i told him biomedicine. He couldnt hear me that well and assumed i was studying medicine.

This were his following words

" Medicine eh? Thats a very good field to go into. Ive been volunteering in the hospital myself for about 13 years. I help out in the food kiosk every wednesday." he told me proudly.

Holy shit, this frail 70plus year old man is a hospital volunteer?? I thought he was going there to be treated, not to serve others!

So i left the bus and the old man feeling not so emo anymore. Its inexplicable, im not sure why. But somehow i was kinda smilling to myself after that short conversation with a random elderly man.

A few minutes later i clocked in for my lab placement in the molecular life science building. Wasnt expecting a good day at all.

Dr Ben left me mostly on my own today, trying to use some of his troubleshooting procedures to save the cDNA batch which i worked 2 weeks to produce, but seemed to not want to replicate in the PCR machine.

So i carried out the procedure, using another template, diffrent buffer, different enzyme yada yada. Let the gel run for a few minutes and processed it in the big computer-UV light thingy next door.

I really was expecting nothing to come up on the screen. Coz everytime im left alone to do stuff i always screw up one way or another.

Lo and behold. An image like Jesus's face on the shroud of turin came up on the screen. And indeed, it was nothing short of a miracle.



To some of you, this would mean absolutely nothing. But to me, those pathethic smudges proved that i have successfully cloned FMR1, FXR1 as well as the FXR2 genes.

You guys may not sense the wow factor in this. So to put this in perspective, we anticipated troubleshooting this part for at least a few weeks, when we nailed it in 2 days.

Hearing the heaps of praises from Ben as well as his marked increase in optimism for this mini project was all that i needed at that point.

Todays experience really lifted me. It started with the random encounter with the old man, and ended with the successful wetwork in the lab. How does this tie to my future?

It just showed me that things dont always go badly. With a little optimism dilligence, a dash of luck ..good things are bound to happen.

So ill just keep my head up, and stride on. Hey, the impossible does happen.

Thanks for reading this meaningless post, till next time, see ya.