Do you know that feeling you get when you look into the sky? You see the stars, and comprehend that you are a tiny speck on planet earth, which is a tiny dot in a galaxy that surrounds you with zillions more stars! In one moment the breadth of the universe explodes inside you, and you become part of something incomprehensibly large.
In microbiology, it was a similar feeling except backwards. I had to swab my throat, my nostrils and my butt, and touch each bacteria-laced cotton swab to a plate. Then, with a metal wire as thin as my hair, I touched the spot and rubbed it over the whole dish.
After a few days we got our plates back, and they had become odorously filled with spotted colonies. At first, like the night sky, they all seemed like similar dots, but looking closer revealed rich diversity like smooth versus spotty, and creamy white versus opaque.
Again, I touched my sterile hair-wire to the colonies and placed a single stroke onto new plates. When these colonies grew, I made slides and stained them. For each slide, again I touched this thin wire to one tiny place on the plate and then rubbed it on a glass slide.
When I focused my first slide on the microscope at 100x, I was stunned to see thousands of bacteria! The purple dots were connected in perfect lines, tangled together like a mess of Christmas lights.
If this is what one little hair could pick up, I started to think about the space in between my teeth, my throat, my body, and every surface I touch throughout the day. No wonder people become obsessive compulsive.
The bacteria go on and on and on… not to mention the viruses or the tiny parasites that can crawl into our skin, sleep in our beds, and live in our blood! I thought of the silly story I heard in middle school about how many spider legs we inhale every day, or are in a candy bar (and now how many bacteria are living on a single spider’s leg).
No matter how often we wash our hands, we are the night sky filled with microbes. And if we count cells, we are more bacteria than human. Being able to see my own bacteria made them real creatures, and suddenly my daily life is filled with company that I didn’t imagine before. I find myself washing things more, and unable to eat party food.
A doctor friend said she understood my fears about party food “…not to mention sushis, sashimis, oysters on shells, nice rare steak, eggs sunny side up,…. yup, we’ve all been there .” I’m sure I’ll get over the extremes of not wanting to eat any party food, but I think I might never get over my desire to look at the microbe galaxy from time to time.
As some of my classmates were complaining about our “boring” lab, I was secretly plotting to take swabs from other parts of my body… or my kitchen sponge, and even my friend’s rash and my husband’s infected eye! Well, I didn’t do it (yet)… but if I had a gram stain kit and a microscope, I would be entertained for hours. Just as I enjoy gaping at the night sky every once in a while, I think I’d like to stare into a microscope regularly and remind myself of all the little things out there.
