They were EVERYWHERE!!

The last couple of weeks on campus have been a little "not normal" as far as summer on campus goes.  Medicine and Dentistry students have been back for 2 weeks now.  As important as they are, or think they are, I didn't really notice that they came back a couple of weeks early until I started trying to meet with my collaborators over in Health Sciences and couldn't get a hold of them some days.  NBD most of the time. 

Bottom line, campus was only kind of busy up until this morning.  This morning, it was VERY BUSY....like "Oh God! Oh God! Ahhh!  Get! Away!" panic-attack kind of busy.  I was mentally prepared so that when I could first see the Bowl, my eyes wouldn't widen and my breath wouldn't get knocked out of me. 

What I was not prepared for was the floods of lost n00bs INSIDE the buildings.  I got pulled into the undertow of a tour group this afternoon right after lunch, in a very narrow hallway.  I think I'm lucky that I've lived to tell the story in all honesty. 

I'm kind of glad that my office is in the depths of Engineering, which is far, far away from all the commotion on Orientation Day.  Mostly because I don't want to have to deal with "Fresh Beats" (as Eamon put it - I thought he was talking about his roommate/officemate and vegetables at first) interrupting my Science-Muttering-Thinking-Dazed moments.  Kind of glad that I don't have windows.  I'm not so glad that my office has a window into a lab/classroom.  I guess you can't win them all.  Either way, I've reconstructed the fort under my desk and hung out there writing about Mad Science for most of the afternoon. 

Speaking of Mad Science, I didn't blog about this earlier, but my adviser and I made a HUGE breakthrough at the beginning of August.  HUGE!  Like "This will revolutionize the way we diagnose, care for patients with, and potentially even treat or cure osteoarthritis!".....well, maybe not that big, but it will definitely change the way we detect it and deal with it in hospitals.  I don't want to blog about it though until I get something published.  I've used it and submitted an abstract to go to San Francisco in February, and I have 2 journal articles in progress, but I don't want to spill the beans before it's been peer-reviewed. 
I can however show you all one image, of about the 180 that I've produced, of a patella with signs of early OA.  The one I've added is at a depth of 0 to 2.5mm below the bone/cartilage interface.  I think it's pretty wicked-awesome, but it's not where the Science is happening.  Think of this guy as a teaser, science-type-teaser:

Mostly, I'm just excited that I have images that are meaningful and that I feel like I'm making some sort of contribution to the medical and engineering communities, despite my severe discomfort with brand-new first-years, large crowds and loud noises.  Tomorrow will be better.....I hope.