Day 38

0810: *yawn*

0900: Bacteriology early again – sticking bacterial colonies from the agar into urea broth. Hopefully I’ll have some results by later this afternoon.

1700: Back to Bacteriology – and we have some Salmonella. Possibly. I stick the positives into TSI and stick them back in the incubator to see what happens.

1900: Argh! For spending most of last night awake, I didn’t get very far with the report – just started typing in some sections. I foresee more very late nights.

Trying to find RM today to go over some more of the report was quite difficult as he has so many things on at the moment. I finally managed to hunt him down, with the help of R, late this afternoon. He gave me a copy of the farm records that the farmer finally got round to sending him this morning – going to have to integrate these into my own results and see what happens!

0200: Took hours tonight trying to reconcile my results with the farm records – in some cases the figures I have are so different from the farm’s that I wondered at times if I was looking at the right spreadsheet. In many cases, piglets have suddenly appeared, as if by miracle, and where before there were maybe 10 born alive, now there were 12. In other cases piglets disappeared, and one sow, complete with her litter of piglets, disappeared completely after I looked at her. So I spent a considerable amount of time tonight – over three hours – trying to bring the two sets of results together.

I really can’t see why there’s such a difference. I know my figures are correct – when I open a bag, and see three dead piglets and a placenta, I know that that particular sow had three dead piglets. How, on the farm records, the same sow suddenly has two deaths is beyond my understanding, unless of course, the farm workers can perform miracles, and one of the dead piglets was resurrected from the skip at the PM room and magically transferred back to the farm…

Apart from that, I got a fair amount done. Have something written in the Results and Discussion sections now, so at least tomorrow I have something to work with. Whether or not it’ll make sense when read by someone who’s fully conscious remains to be seen.