My third week was again mainly focused on the study. Much like the start of last week I spend the majority of my time pipetting and integrating the HPLC results.
Another five patient urine samples were selected and I went about creating the second batch for the project in order to give a total of 10 patients used within the study. Due the endless amount of pipetting I had made my way through last week, I had my technique down to a T and worked my way through the remaining 5 patients in record time (well much quicker than last week anyway). Again the majority of the aliquots were put away for storage at designated conditions ready to be analysed at a later date.
Whilst these were running, I took some time to go over the oddities from last week again and worked to highlight anomalies.
As the week continued I processed the correct samples and didn’t have to ask nearly as many questions as the first time around!
I got the chance to work with one of the Biomedical Scientists who was working on samples to be run via HPLC in order to aid the diagnosis of adrenal gland tumours. This gave me the opportunity to see the different ways in which the equipment can be used for diagnosis (opposed to the carcinoid tumour diagnosis I was working on) and also gave a good comparison between the different techniques employed in the different tests (the sample preparation method for adrenal gland tumours if far more complicated than that of 5-HIAA!)
When I had time to spare, I found myself a computer and got to work on sorting through the pages and pages of results we’d accumulated, allowing my to start drafting graphs for comparison of results, and hopefully after a few more runs I’ll be able to determine if the predictions we had were correct!