Missing my baby

Well, I have made to South Dakota all safe and sound. Freaking miracle, I tell ya. I got to the ticket counter yesterday morning in Missoula, and the woman said, "Oh, looks like they reissued your tickets incorrectly. You are not going to Salt Lake are you?"…Surprisingly, I did not freak out or read the woman the riot act. She actually remembered me from the previous week and the troubles with the airplane and how I was one of the few people that was not treating the ticket counter people with malevolent vitriol…like it was their fault the silly mechanic did not fix the plane, as if they wanted to spend their morning with grumpy stuck people…moving on. The kind woman asked me how my baby was and quickly fixed the ticket. Crisis avoided!

There are impressive amounts of snow here! Apparently, this is an extra snowy winter here in Vermillion. I would have pictures, but I left the good camera with Dalen in hopes that he would document every minute..okay that is a little excessive, most minutes of Westin's life while I was gone (with all of the copious spare time he will have caring for a 2.5 month old, all on his own). It does not feel that much colder than Montana. For you southern people, you won't believe me when I say that there is something absolutely exhilarating about stepping out in dry, cold air. It just makes me happy. Now dealing with wet, cold air, well that is different, and in a not entirely pleasant way. If Copper, the BearDog, was with me right now, he would be plowing through the snow mounds and happily burrowing in the snow. Vermillion is a small town, but larger than Hamilton. It is like a quaint college town. There is a mixture of gorgeous old brick buildings with more modern campus buildings, like the beautiful Sanford School of Medicine building. It is organized brilliantly and all of the lab space (like the one that I would have, if offered a position) is new and modern and CLEAN. I would not have to worry about who had the lab before me and what kinds of treasures are lurking in the corners of drawers. For example, when we moved to West Virginia, we were cleaning out the lab and I came across a very old vial, cryptically labeled M. tuberculosis. Needless to say, I donned gloves and a mask quickly and had a biohazard bag at the ready for the remainder of the clean-up. Good times, good times.

So far the science is good. I meet more of the micro contingent of the Division today. There are no department chairs, just a Division of Biomedical Sciences. So, if you want something, then you go straight to the Dean. The Micro group has been mainly gram positives..Strep pyogenes. E. faecealis, group a strep, MRSA, etc. They are trying to hire people with expertise in host-pathogen interactions..and this is why I am here. What is exciting is that at least two groups are starting to wade into the complicated world of co-infection.This is very exciting! In the lab, when we study infectious disease, you typically think of one type of organism infecting one type of cell or one part of a sterile animal. In real life, you have one dominant organism that is causing infection in the background of many commensals, or secondarily to the primary viral infection. You can see how it would be complicated, but I think you can also see how it might be important to start thinking about infection in this sense, because during an infection all sorts of things (including your normal flora) get way out of whack, initially by the infection and secondarily from the drugs used to treat the infection. Not many researchers do these types of studies, because well, it is complicated. Here, they are starting with primary H1N1 viral infections, and then studying a secondary infection with Group A Strep. They are starting to track why cells/hosts are more susceptible to a bacterial infection after an initial viral infection. Most of the deaths associated from H1N1 flu are due to a secondary bacterial infection. So far these studies are producing interesting and meaningful results. Because the science group is organized as a Division, collaborators are easy to find and work with. On this particular project, there is a viral person, a bacterial person, and a lung physiologist. I know that there is a woman here studying cervical epithelia, etc., so I can envision a similar collaboration with Chlamydia and trying to flush out HPV/Chlamydia co-infection types of questions. Are you all still with me or are you tired of all of the science??

I spoke to Dalen at least 3 times yesterday. Westin is doing brilliantly! He is eating well and napping well. I heard him cooing in the phone and I just wanted to hug and cuddle with him. I knew this trip would be far more taxing on me than my darling baby boy. I hope that Dalen had an easy night with little West. Yesterday morning before I left, West was being extra cute. He was a smiles and coos. It took a lot for me to just get ready so that I could leave on time. My baby is amazing. My family is amazing and I miss them all very much. Thank goodness that I am heading home tomorrow. Oddly, I only slept for 5.5 hours last night. Maybe it is nerves over the talk or maybe I am just used to the lack of sleep. Gotta go get ready now! Hope everyone has a great day!