First publication, first hospital admission

Today has been an unusual day.  I started out with a PET scan at 7:30 this morning with a 11:30 CT scan following.  The combination of heading in much earlier than usual and no breakfast (because of the scans) threw me off a little from the start.  I've been having increased pelvic pain in the mornings which wasn't helping things either.  The PET went fairly quickly with the anticipated hour wait time in between the radioactive glucose injection and the actual scan being taken up with an episode of Breaking Bad.  The wait for the CT was long and unexpected, but I got a number of cat naps in.  About 30 mins after the scan I got a call from Van Tine's nurse saying the radiologist saw that I have an obstructed small bowel and that I need to be admitted.  Turns out it wasn't an emergency by any stretch since I was told to come back around 5pm to check in and the only treatment I've gotten so far (9pm) is a fluid drip.

I appear to be an unusual case of obstructed bowel since I'm not hunched over in pain and abdominal cramps.  I feel fine for the most part, but my appetite and regularity has been hit and miss lately.  The plan seems to be observation over night with another CT in the morning to see if the obstruction is still there.  I emailed Van Tine to see what he thought and he is confident that 'conservative treatment will cause the obstruction to regress'.  I guess we'll wait and see what happens.

A glimmer of excitement brightened my day when we got an email from one of our collaborators that the paper I worked on got accepted to the journal Cell.  The work that I contributed to the paper was a side project which turned out to have novel results which complemented the work that this other group was putting together.  They were way ahead of us data and results wise, so it made sense to combine efforts than try to get separate papers.  Several months and only one revision proved that it was very mutually beneficial arrangement.  Luck was definitely on my side on this one.  Hopefully my primary project will pan out too, but it's going to take a lot more work before that potential publication sees the light of day.