I Vant Your Blood (And Other Body Fluids)

I thought that October would be a good month to talk about blood and other fluids pertaining to my second job in the lab. Sometimes it's just fun to get a glimpse into people's work spaces, and since I work in a Secret building at Rockwell that doesn't allow cameras, I thought I would tour you through a little part of the lab.

Here is your hostess:


This is Serology, home of Urinalysis, and other Microbiology testing such as Flu tests, Strep tests, Pregnancy, Drug Screens, Rhumatoid Arthritis, Campylobacter (that means things in your stool), HIV, Parasite Panels, RSV, and so on and so forth. Basically it's the home of stools, body fluids, and urine, or as the little Asian guy that works in Outreach says, "two pee pees foh yooou, I have two pee pees foh yoooooou" - yes, he said it JUST like that, on purpose (so I'm not making fun of Asian people). I sit at this microscope for hours looking at white cells, red cells, bacteria, and STD's sometimes......blech, those make me feel itchy.

Here is a urine. We pour it off into the tube, and centrifuge it. Then we add purple dye to it so it shows up better on the microscope and we count the things we see in it.

This is a picture of a slide that I looked at.

This is a hood, not like the kind you live in, but the kind that smelly things are tested in. It has a big fan, and believe me, you need it. All hoods have a glass shield that you can pull down so you don't get splashed with anything, but typically they are up because it's too hard to move your hands around with the shield down.

This is another hood. It's used for plating specimens like body fluids (plerual, synovial, spinal), sputums (ulgh!), stools, urines, pus from wounds, tissues (that yes, we have to cut and grind), and my least favorite, fungal nails (mostly because it's like the nail with meat still attached - shivers to self). Ok, that was a little gross. So anyway, we plate the specimens on media under the hood. Here is the media. Luckily it doesn't smell. It's Jello-like and the organisms grow on there. The microbiologists take the colonies that form on the media and test it to determine what kind of antibiotics can be given, and also determine what the bacteria is (staph infection, strep, etc.)
Some specimens require gram stains, so we make a slide with the swab, and stain it with this stain.

Then we look at the stained slides under the microscope and write down what kind of bacteria, white cells, etc. we see on the slide.

The rest of the plates go into the incubator which is warm and steamy and usually stinks when you open it. Here the bacteria grows on the plate.

This guy is the Bug Box. It holds anaerobic specimens. These are specimens that come on sterile swabs and are kept in here to grow because certain bacteria grows only with no air. You put the gloves on, suck all the air out of the chamber, and put the plates in here to grow.

Ok, now on to Blood Bank.

Mom works in Blood Bank. The blood bank does Rhogam workups for pregnant women, prepares platelets, fresh frozen plasma, does anti-body testing, blood typing, cross-matches for surgery, transfusion reaction work-ups, and many other things.

This is what the blood looks like.

All of these tubes are used to do a crossmatch, to determine the blood types, antibodies, etc. The donor and recipient units are tested for compatibility.

Here are the different reagents used to determine the blood type and Rh factor.
The Mississippi Valley blood bank in Davenport, IA supplies the blood and once it's typed it gets the patients name put on it and it's set aside for their procedure (surgery). Sometimes people give their own blood for their own surgery, these are called autologous units and they are also stored here.

This is a water bath to warm components.

This is not for heating up their Hot Pockets, it's for thawing Plasma. Instead of a 'Popcorn' button, they have a 'Plasma' button.

This is the platelet rocker. It rocks around in a circle to keep the platelets from clumping in the bags.

This is just a handful of the things that go on in the lab, it's really interesting and a nice break from the business world. This concludes our lab tour.