Another day at work

The hospital has been going through some maintenance work lately. Signs are being put up all over the place warning people to watch out for wet paint on doors, walls and railings. Generally the hospital works with the same color scheme on its walls. The color looks to me like a mix of beige, off white and light yellow. Recently I discovered that the color the hospital has been using for its walls is called 'Mortuary Cream'. How morbid is that?? A rather grim prediction for the patients don't you think?

* DISTURBING

Sometimes we have to collect specimens from around the hospital and bring it back to the lab. Some items have to be kept cold and we use padded bags for such collections as it keeps the specimen chilled till its arrival. I regularly use a big shoulder bag cos you'll never know when something huge needs to be collected. The speci's are usually in a see through plastic container with yellow or green screw on caps and the containers are subsequently placed into a biohazard zip lock bag for additional safety. There was once I collected a mid sized container in a zip lock and placed it in the bag. While heading to the lab, I heard a 'swish swash' going on that sounded suspicious. I gingerly looked into the shoulder bag and saw some liquid flowing around the base of the bag.

Absolutely gross! It turns out the screw cap was not tightly screwed on by the nurse and the zip lock bag was not tightly pressed down. While walking, I had effectively swished the liquid into the shoulder bag. It was not pleasant. In case you are wondering what liquid was going around the bag, it was formalin. So when I arrived at the lab, I had to don on gloves, arm myself with napkins, grabbed a bottle of Viraclean (an anti-everything cleaner) and proceeded to the big sinks with huge taps. The bag was entirely washed out, properly sprayed and completely wiped with Viraclean. We can't take any risks with formalin because firstly the fumes of evaporating formalin is quite pungent+dangerous and it came with the specimen was soaked in it. So think internal body bits soaked in that and you get the idea...

* DISGUSTING

cheryl