Tuesday, January 30, 2007

I feel terrible!

Ok, my supervisor is totally messing with me.

After a long day of admin, registering, chasing the IT guy around with my laptop and then not going to the zoo, I was completely exhausted. Fortunately, because I was waiting for my laptop, I went to the lab and settled down to pretend to do some reading while collapsing over my keyboard and getting some much needed sleep. I say fortunately becuase, as I was settling down (but not yet sleeping) my supervisor walked in and acted all upset that he'd disturbed me working. He needed my help to fill in the forms that would give me a very nice bursary for the next 2-3 years which goes under 'living expenses.' After that he was all nice to me and said he'd get me a new flashdrive and told me all about his pets (minus 1 hedgehog; + 1 tortoise = a severely depleted succulent garden).

So now the urge to throttle has decreased moderately (it's still there, kind of like an itch behind my fingernails). I hate the way every time I get sufficiently angry to do something about it he goes all nice. I'm beginning to think I'm just an experiment too...

Anyway, the point of the title, I just got the report from the post-mortem on the iguana. Basically the people taking out her organs (and it WAS a her) forgot the kidneys and the parathyroid glands, so it's not as conclusive as it might be, but there were calcium crystals pretty much everywhere. Attached is an article on the importance of balancing calcium and phosphorus in iguana diets. I quote:

"Not only will Ca be lost to an iguana’s bones if it eats spinach frequently, but excessive calcium oxalate crystals can damage the kidneys sufficiently to cause uremia and death from renal failure."

I feel terrible... and even worse because a little bit of me is glad that I wasn't the one feeding her for the last few months of her life...

1 comments:

Luke said...

You murderer! You stuffed that iguana with swiss chard all of the time!

I'm kidding. You had no way of knowing apart from that book I gave you called 'Iguanas for dummies'. As far as I remember, it didn't warn you about chard enough...

RIP Melville