Nothin' but the flax, mamm....

Seven days, its hard to believe all that has transpired since last Thursday when I was run over on my bicycle by a car. Riding 64 miles on Sunday in the North Shore Century, limping around on a very sore knee for the next several days, driving to Champaign-Urbana on Tuesday and getting a flat tire 20 miles north of Rantoul on I57 and having to change the tire using a screw driver to wind the jack up not being able to locate the jack handle (DOH!), sacrificing 189 3.5 year old hens, half of which had been on flaxseed diet for a year, sleeping overnight, but not two nights in Champaign, driving back to Chicago and arriving in the Gold Coast at 10 PM to deliver my workmate to his apartment in the midst of the throbbing al fresco crowds at State, Clark and Division, waking up in my own bed and able to walk my son to school, take the dogs for a walk and then drive the car to UIC to deliver the samples, leave early to get the tire repaired, a nice walk to pick Ryder up from school, and then a fitful night of sleep dissecting chickens in my dreams, then hours ago, up before dawn to ride my bike to work with the Oak Park Bike gang, all of whom were so very interested to hear the results of the flaxseed study. Me too. Lot's of numbers to crunch and analysis to conduct. Whew. The build up for the big chicken harvest lasted for months and months, and then in 20 hours of necropsy we were done. The tough thing about dissecting chickens is the feathers. The ones with really gross metastatic cancer and bellies full of ascites definitely challenge the senses. Slashing fingers with scalpels with fingers immersed in metastatic soup is not a good thing either. Standing head bent dissecting for hour after hour certainly a physically demanding thing to do as well. The camaraderie unsurpassed, the gathering together of the troops to do the big project was really extraordinary. Now, the analysis. Our first take on the data looks very promising. Flaxseed appears to have a definite preventative and suppressive effect. We won't know about the suppression until we do the histology and processing 500 samples is going to take a lot of time. But we are sitting on a treasure of data. Nothing left to do but write the papers. Yeah, right.....