Anyone else work in medical fields? I'm a medical lab worker, and my day consists of some of the most vile and infectious substances handled by anyone. Nurses..I totally feel ya. You have to deal with this stuff AND the angry patient.
I get to deal with playing with the nasty stuff with a bitchy supervisor hovering over me demanding we put out results faster for a test that takes at least 2 days to complete anyway.
Nastiest stuff I think to deal with is fecal samples. I'm sorry but no matter how many times I plop that applicator into a fecal sample, stir it around, and prepare it for culture and microscopy...I gag. Worse...I work with a girl who says 'just think of it as chocolate frosting!' Ugh. There goes my appetite for the next forty years!
And have you ever noticed how many people do NOT handle specimens properly? I can't tell you how many times I get samples for ammonia tests that are not light protected and delivered on ice.
I can't tell you how many times I get blood for hematology in a normal no additive tube, and they ask why I specifically request an EDTA tube. Oh I dunno...maybe to keep the blood from CLOTTING.
I understand that most phlebotomists only get trained for like...2 weeks and thus don't know everything the lab does about proper specimen handling, but why aren't we teaching others? If the medical personel could stop behaving like everything's so cutthroat and competitive (which it is sometimes) and we took the time to talk and teach, things could be done right the first time so we wouldn't have to send a nurse back to an already aggitated patient to get ANOTHER sample.
I can only imagine how horrible a Nurse would feel having to tell a patient there was a mistake with the lab. At the same time, I detest that, because we didn't make the sampling error, but we certainly get blamed.
>_< How do the rest of the medical personel feel? I imagine nurses have their own drama in their field, and doctors too.
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