grossest. post. ever.

That is a warning to the squeamish among you - you may wish to skip this post, 'cause I've got a story to tell about what happened at work today (possibly my crappiest day on the job to date), and it ain't pretty. In fact, it's really icky, so if you have a low tolerance for gore, you may leave now. I promise less-icky posts in the near future.

For the stout-hearted among you, here is my tale of flesh and woe:

As I've mentioned before, I work in a medical laboratory. You know it's going to be a bad day at work when, as you arrive at 7 in the morning, uncaffeinated and bleary-eyed, the night-shift guy greets you by saying, "I've got a mess for you, little lady." But really, nothing can prepare one for being presented with a whole, gangrenous, severed human toe in a specimen cup.

Besides being very, very disgusting, the toe presented several procedural problems. I work in the microbiology department. We're not supposed to get whole severed body parts. Those get put in formalin and go to pathology. If we get flesh for a culture, it should be a relatively small piece of tissue, because we need to grind it up before we can set it up on the agar plates. And the test should be ordered as a tissue culture, so the techs know what sort of specimen we had (or at the very least as an OR culture, as the toe came from the operating room), but it was ordered as a wound culture instead (specimens for wound cultures generally come on swabs stored in preservative medium). So not only did I have to wrangle an inappropriate specimen, I had to fix the orders in the comptuer, as well (which is the part of my job where I have the least experience, so it takes me far longer than it should, and I usually need to get someone to help me muddle through).

And man, when I say wrangle... I had to get some tissue out of the toe to grind up. We have these kits we use when we need to cut stuff up - they have sterile tweezers and scissors and forcep-things, and they used to have scalpels in them. But of course, today, when I really could have used a scalpel, we just happened to be out of the scalpel-containing kits. So I basically had to hold the toe with the tweezers and hack at it with the scissors as best I could (and I kid you not - just as I sat down to start hacking, Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" came on the radio. Hee.). We couldn't use the foul outer skin of the toe - we needed the inner bits. It would have been so much easier with a scalpel. I don't know what was wrong with the toe that it had to be removed, but it looked really awful. Honestly, I have to handle all manner of bodily fluids and secretions in my job, so I'm not that easily grossed out. But this was far and away the grossest thing I've encountered to date. Even the seasoned medical techs were disturbed (tho' not too disturbed to make some sick jokes). It looked like, y'know when you overcook sausage and it gets all dark and swollen and blistered? Like that. It was listed on the requisition form as "third toe," but it was so swollen it was the size of a big toe. And then on the other end, the bone was still sticking out, all bloody and raw. There was a whole joint still in there, too, which brought another level of difficulty to the tissue extraction. I only managed to get a tiny bit of usable stuff. And then there was the grinding, which is always arduous.

Add to that another specimen in the same batch with a mis-ordered test, meaning more time lost messing around on the computer... I wasn't even finished processing the first drop when the second one showed up, and on a normal Saturday, I've got time to do the first drop, read all the inter-office e-mail that has piled up in my inbox since my last shift two weeks ago, and start in on callback before the second drop arrives.

That pretty much set the tone for the whole day. Callback is a morning thing, but I didn't even get to it until after lunch. I nearly slid off the road in the fresh snow rushing to make a yellow light so I could get back to work within my ridiculously short lunch half-hour. I found out today that, despite what I'd thought for months, I am not supposed to work tomorrow (New Year's Day), but Monday instead. Why? Because there's this crack-headed scheme where, if there's a holiday on Sunday, Sunday becomes Monday and Monday becomes the holiday. Apparently this is long-standing company policy. Would've been nice if someone had let me know before I'd planned my weekend around working Saturday and Sunday. At least, allegedly, I will still get holiday pay even though I'm not working on the actual holiday (but rather, on the fake holiday). I got to work almost on time this morning (which is a big deal for my chronically-late self), but it was so busy and stuff kept coming up all day, I ended up leaving over an hour late. Ri-diculous. The only saving grace was that the radio played tons of great songs (probably a post-Christmas-music backlash - thank goodness). I guess Lite 105.9 is a better station that I thought it was. But overall - just a crap day. A crap end to a crap year. Good riddance, 2005. Not that I expect 2006 to be any better.

Anywho. We just spent the evening drinking the hefeweizen and framboise lambic I picked up on the way home, and watching DVDs, which we haven't done in a long time (for the record, pre-minuit: Chinatown and an episode of Black Adder; post-minuit: two episodes from the first season of Chappelle's Show). And now I guess it's time to go pass out. Bonne Année, everybody.

P.S. - was it just us, or was it kind of creepy having Dick Clark on ABC this year?