Ladies and gentlemen, the plague is upon us.

It’s upon me anyway.

I haven’t been sick in a while, I suppose I was due. But my goodness– this cold is miserable! Trying to keep a little perspective, though. Thank goodness for drugs (better living through chemistry!) and the snuggles of my sweet pup. I have a feeling I’ll be on the mend in short order and all will be well by the weekend.

It better be, anyway! Because I’ve got PLANS! Book club on Saturday night… Wes Anderson movie marathon on Sunday. I’m pumped about both– so sickness be gone!

So. Are you ready for a forced and awkward segue? Good!

Sickness… diseases… bacteria… bacterial STDs… I studied bacterial STDs in grad school…

And we’re there.

Some seriously good news on the gonorrhea/chlamydia forefront last week!! My old boss emailed to let me know that my coinfection model has been repeated. And not just once, but TWICE. Once in another strain of mice (in case you’re “in the know”… I did it originally in BALB/c mice, another graduate student just did it in C57/Bl6) and once by another group up in Boston (total burn moment for the drunk PIs who tormented me at my poster in Banff– mwuahahaahaha!!). Both repeated my entire first paper– demonstrated coinfection with gonorrhea and chlamydia in female mice (which is ridiculously and unfortunately common in female humans) and increased levels of gonorrhea in mice that are coinfected with chlamydia (which incidentally, has also been shown in women since I graduated… word).

So, all that’s good news… but the really exciting thing to me is that while I was in grad school, I found the freaking mechanism. I did flow cytometry, I made beautiful figures, I wrote a paper and planned to submit it to PNAS (it’s a big deal), but since I graduated in 2011, that lovely piece of work has sat there in my dissertation on a shelf. HOWEVER, now that others have repeated the findings from my original manuscript, my grad advisor feels comfortable getting this second one out there. YESSSSSSS!!!!!

Gonorrhea’s pretty exciting, huh? Better than whatever virus is hanging out in my sinuses at the moment, anyway.

So let’s celebrate– and CLAP for the CLAP!

(Clap = gonorrhea. But I’m sure you already knew that.)