Yes, it is Brain surgery
It took me three months to psyche myself into doing honors. It took three minutes for my P I to totally destroy any shred of confidence I had that I would be able to do this project. It took a three hour long ISD phone call to the U S of A to gather up all my spilt guts with some much needed words of encouragement and send a simple " yes, I'll do it no matter how tough you say it'll be" email to the same P I.
Its been three weeks and I'm still alive. Woo hoo.

Now, I'd louve to say that it was all much easier than I thought it would be, that it had only been fear I'd had to fear of at that first instance. No, I had very real things to fear, like the wild and wonderful jungle of my mind, where stray thoughts prowl and pounce at will, and eat words like "focus", " accuracy" and "concentration" for dinner. I'm hopelessly scatter brained. Of course, thats what makes me such a colorful delight of a person, but its not exactly the ideal skill set to bring with you to neuro biological research.

My first lab rat, my very own, the rat that was named after me, ARN/02/07, died pathetically on the operation table. I think I squeezed its skull too much while fixing it up for brain surgery and it hemorrhaged. It wheezed and whined and died sullenly with a " now look what you've done" expression on its face. Crap. I nearly blinded my supervisor with a prepared injection syringe full of atropine and displayed my fantastically poor arithmetic to the entire lab on my very second day.
But I've also uncovered a few talents that have lain buried under assumptions of daintiness. For one, I have no qualms about post-mortem. I can drill on target, any marked point on rat-skull. I can scicssor and scapel my way through innards, diphragm and ribs, all the way to a tiny, delicate heart, beating away its last on my fore and mid fingers. I can cleanly pull out a rubbery spinal cord from its housing in the vertebral column.

I know, it all sounds rather gory, but we're studying the nervous system and the effects of morphine on it and I feel its important work, the kind that might just make a difference in world. Of course, I feel like a bumbling fool on many days, but its all passing to give way to something really exciting...and ( I hardly believe I'm saying this) Fun.