Nitya Talreja #5 Ovarian Cancer Part 3

To my disappointment, my last few days at my lab, most of the dogs became mysteriously sick. Dr. Otto, Dr. Ramirez, and other PennVet externs predicted this mysterious illness may have been passed on from a human-canine contact or may have been due to a patch of mushrooms growing outside. The first to get sick was baby Hoke (a 3 month old yellow lab). He was quarantined in the women's restroom to avoid the other dogs becoming sick too.

Also, one of the more advanced interns, Camden, was leaving the same day as me and was also fostering Quigley ( a black lab) at the time. To celebrate the completion of our internship, she asked me to meet her in Princeton one day to walk Quigley around for public access purposes. I met her Wednesday morning at the Princeton Train Station and we walked all around Princeton University's campus and Nassau Street. Camden trained Quigley for public access walking for a few hours while I recorded her with a video camera and filled out all the necessary Environmental Exposure data. Quigley did quite well; he was seldom tempted to greet other people and was not distracted by all the construction conducted on Princeton's campus. Unfortunately, he also got sick during out outing and we had to shorten our walk and head back to the PWDC.



     My last few days at the PWDC, the cancer trials changed once again. Dr. Lorenzo promised that these new trials would be the new norm from now on at the PWDC.

  Originally, there were three experimental ports on the scent detection wheel at all times: a malignant, a benign, and a normal from 3 different people. From now on there would still be 3 experimental ports, but those three ports would alternate between 6 different samples instead of 3 from 6 different people. In other words, there would be 2 benign, 2 malignant, and 2 normal samples alternating between 3 ports in-between the trials . There would also be 5 trials per dog instead of 3 due to the addition of samples.
 
  This new change made the first day of trials extremely stressful and hectic because no one was used to the new method yet. Worst of all, Dr. Lorenzo was not overseeing the trial and put a PennVet intern in charge of so great a responsibility. The first day of testing the cancer was shuffling to maintain the correct samples in the correct ports. Between all 5 trials we had to distract the cancer dog, with just enough time to place all the samples in their specific port numbers after cleaning all the samples. The task required at least 6 people in the back room. I was extremely surprised that we didn't break anything of mess up the samples after the trials that day. All three dogs took about 4 hours to run on the wheel instead of the normal 2 hours. The second day of testing, we began to develop efficient methods to help differentiate the 6 samples and we assigned each person to one task to avoid any possible mistakes. The purpose of using 6 different samples instead of 3 was to avoid dogs from alerting on the specific scent of the person. By implementing 2 different malignant samples, we were teaching the dog to alert of the scent of the cancer, not the person. The success rate of the dogs dropped drastically, from an unwavering 98% to a mediocre 50%. Despite the drop, Dr. Lorenzo still has high hopes for the trial and for improvement within the cancer dogs. He predicts that with time, the dogs will get used to the new setup and improve their success rate on the malignant sample.