tuna tree!

These socks from Sock Dreams are so babely! I love science, and somehow that has led me to eroticize the "knowing your shit and looking professional and competent and intelligent" aesthetic. It's really silly, but I think that I look cute in those lead gowns one wears when taking x-rays, or when I have on surgical gloves and masks, or when I'm bent over a microscope looking at, um, fecal samples (I know, so sexy, right). Maybe there's also an element of wanting to emulate Dana Scully somewhere in there, too. I guess the point of that paragraph is: science is so great and fascinating, and being so interested in learning new procedures and facts makes me feel confident and self-assured and, by extension, pretty darn attractive.

On a more serious note, today I conducted a heartworm antigen test (really the least interesting test I do on a regular basis) that ended up being positive. It's the first time that I've ever actually come across heartworm disease in a dog in this economically wealthy area (my erstwhile foster dog in Carrboro, NC had a low infestation of heartworms, but that was almost to be expected, considering the circumstances of her previous life; she was ostensibly chained up all the time, had recently birthed some puppies that mysteriously disappeared, had a three-inch-wide hairless line down her back, most likely from some cringe-inducing injury that she had endured, and she wound up in a high-kill, rural gassing shelter that had made the news several times in a month for animal cruelty -- luckily, she's totally fine now, with a loving owner). The host is a young dog who is full of life and definitely the sweetest patient we saw today, so I really hope that we can nip it in the bud and help the dog on his merry way. I'll be interested to see how this situation develops over the next few weeks. Right now the next step is to send another blood sample off to the lab for more sensitive testing to make sure that it's not a false positive. We'll go from there, I guess.