More baby showers!

It's in the water, folks.  You have been warned.  This time we had a lovely shower for a coworker and her sweet baby girl.  Little miss surprised her mommy by being a tad bit early too.  The shower was adorable (and just in the nick of time!) and we all had a great time.  

Baby shower

Our surprise baby shower for Luz at work!  

Going with the FLOW

In the midst of the work chaos of training, working extra weekends, and crazy multitasking, I have become the "key operator" of our new BD FACSCalibur!  It is a flow cytometer used to identify CD4 markers on T-Helper cells.  It will be used to monitor the immune status of immunocompromised patients (especially those with HIV).  I'm so excited to work on this project.  It has been fun to learn the technology and get it up and running in our lab.  Call me a nerd but this stuff is cool!  

Med Tech.  Clinical Laboratory Scientist.  Not many people know what we do and fewer still know how we do it.  We are the ones that are unseen and often forgotten, but we play a vital role in patient care, diagnosis, and treatment.  In fact, over 70% of a patients diagnosis comes from us!  From blood smears and differentials to electrolytes and hormone levels, and wound cultures to transfusions.  We do it all.  

I love my job and take great pride in my skills and my coworkers.  

This was my first year as a real Med Tech and therefore a "real" participant in Lab week.  [SIDE NOTE: I've been out of school for a year and been working at Eskenazi for over 9 months!!!  WHAT???]  It was a week full of fun (and treats!) that made the days seem to fly by.  We had pizza one day and Olive Garden another day, then of course leftovers for a couple of days.  We had contests like "match the pet to the tech" and a cookie bake off and of course prizes.  All in all, it was a fun week celebrating our careers and the way we care for patients.  

Weekend Work

I passed another milestone in my "new" job a couple of weeks ago. I worked my first weekend. This marked the end of my official training and the start of handeling benches on my own. Weekends have a lower volume of work but with fewer staff, I had a large hematology area to cover. The weekend went really well and I managed to hold my own despite it being only 3 days after going live with our new hematology analyzers. Funny thing though; working that weekend made me the resident expert on the new instruments which pretty much still stands. I dont mean that in a cocky way by any means. The analyzer is new to everyone and having four or so consecutive days running it, trouble shooting it, and releasing results with low volume of "experts" to ask over the weekend made me feel pretty competent. I really enjoyed the fast pace and managed to keep up and hold my own. The downside of working the weekend was, well, not having a weekend, but having the days off during the week was a huge perk. I even got to take Mom out for her birthday! I dont know, maybe I can get use to this weekend thing... At least for the couple time a month it comes around.

Tortellini Pasta Salad

I couldn't wait to post this after making it tonight.  We are having a birthday pitch-in at work tomorrow and I needed an appetizer that was easy and could be refrigerated.  I decided it was the perfect opportunity to try something from Pinterest [of course].  I've been wanting to try this new rendition of pasta salad for a while now.  It has tortellini, cherry tomatoes, pepperoni, basil, and fresh mozzarella.  It turned out SO GOOD.  I'm SUPER excited to take it in tomorrow.

The original recipe can be found here by "Dream Home Cooking Girl."  I made a couple changes.  First, I was making it for a large group so instead of using all tortellini, I used a box of colored spiral noodles as well.  I figured it would make it a little less rich and add some more color.  Second, my little basil plant that has done so well all summer while I didn't need it, is now pretty sorry looking so I used dried basil to taste.  Really, I didn't do a lot of measuring; just kinda eyeballed it.  All-in-all, it was very easy and VERY yummy.  

• Cook tortellini and spiral noodles in separate pots following package directions 
• (I used a normal box of noodles and two 8 oz packages of tortellini.)
• Once done, drain and rinse with cold water
• Add in:
• about a cup of cherry tomatoes, halved
• 3/4 cup of pepperoni cut in to small pieces
• 1 cup fresh mozzarella cheese, diced
• about 3/4 cup Ceasar dressing
• basil, salt, and pepper to taste (Original recipe calls for 3/4 cup copped fresh basil)
• Gently stir and refrigerate

I'm sure this will make for a story later....

Well, I've survived my first week of work.  And when I say survived, I mean it.  I started the week with two days of orientation.  At the end of the second day, the Wishard computer system crashed and was down for more than 36 hours.  The WHOLE computer system.  No way to register patients, order tests, view histories or results, nothing.  While  "down time" creates a problem for almost every area of the hospital, it creates a very chaotic and incomprehensible problem for the lab.  Everyone handled the mess gracefully but the backlog of work, manual processing, and endless phone calls meant no one had time to deal with new employees.  They were all very apologetic but I spent most of the week sorting papers and doing what I could to help and stay out of the way.  The majority of my processing training has been rescheduled for Monday and Tuesday, then I can finally begin training to be a generalist tech in the core lab's chemistry and hematology departments!  Yippee!