Another One For My List

...Of a few members of a certain medical discipline whom I would not want near, let alone treating me, my family, or anyone I know.

Is it accurate to say everyone's got a certain gross-out threshold? One person's 'ick' might not be another person's. Some things, however, cross the line in most developed settings these days. I have been a Med Tech long enough to remember the ancient times of mouth-pipetting, and working all shift handling blood (or whatever) specimens without wearing a single glove. Gloves? I don't even think we had them in the lab. Those were reserved for handling straight hydrochloric acid and dangerous stuff like that. I've heard one of the old pre-merge campuses once had a pop-corn popper at home right on the lab bench. Smoking and eating were commonplace throughout the entire work area.

Times have changed. Oh, how they've changed.

The culture has changed so much, and the no food/drink/cosmetics in the lab dogma has been drilled into our heads so completely that for the most part this SIMPLY ISN'T DONE. Because it's potential danger to oneself. You know, those things called biohazards? Cross contamination? Hospital-acquired infections? Because every overseeing, regulatory entity that has anything to do with running a laboratory says so repeatedly. Because it's just plain gross.

So when the nurse who walked into the ED lab carrying the catheter-collected urine specimen and her cup of coffee in the SAME HAND, and then noticeably struggled to drop off the urine sample and not the coffee into our incoming specimen bucket, my ick reflex automatically went off. Couldn't help it. I said 'Oh, urine and coffee, yummy.'

She must have thought about that after she left, because 5 minutes later she came back. 'I know you must not have meant anything by that comment,' she says to me.

'What comment?' My occupied mind was roughly a light-year away by this point.

'The comment about the urine and the coffee.'

Ummm, well actually I did mean it. I generally mean most everything I say. But I didn't say that. At this point she proceeded to launch into a lengthy reaming. You see, she says she feels icky all of a sudden at 11pm. I wanted to ask what was the magic pumpkin thing about 11pm, but sensed I'd better not. What she intended to convey, in a fakey-sweet tone, was that when third shift personnel arrived, all of a sudden she was treated rudely. Guess we'll have to ask second shift what they do differently to make her feel so much better. But what I thought at the time was that any ickiness she felt she must have brought from home, and certainly did not originate from our little corner of the world. Didn't say that either. I was occupied with nodding and listening and refusing to engage in the fight she was so determined to bring on. And trying not to be distracted by her gray (yes, gray, I'm telling you) teeth and horrible fake blonde hair color job. She went on to proudly tell me she was a farm girl, and I had no idea what she was used to having crawl all over her. She told me she wanted to enjoy her job, and not have be confronted by this issue with various supervisors, and that my saying what she had done was icky was simply my opinion, and on and on...

When my trip back to school was all said and done, and the door shut behind her, and my esteemed coworker flipped her the bird behind her back, we had a good laugh about the whole thing. Some of my coworkers have had very negative encounters with this nurse before, and it came out that some of her own coworkers can't even stand her. So it probably would have done no good whatsoever to point out to her that it's established policy (and not opinion) to avoid combining consumables and lab specimens in the workplace, and that pee and java in the same hand would be a good example of a bad thing. Or to suggest that if she wanted to go all farm girl and roll in manure or make mud pies at home, by all means, that was completely her choice. Or ask her if she informs her patients what she's had crawling all over her before she comes to work and puts her hands on them. Or say that life on her particular farm has clearly set dentistry back by about two hundred years. Nope. All exercises in futility. I said a few prayers for her patients, and enjoyed the hysteria-tainted laughs with my comrades.