Teacher Shared His Used Needle with Students

Two days of sickness got in the way of my blogging and I am one or two posts behind now. I recently had an allergy attack that sent me to bed. The white of my eyes bulged out of my sockets due to angioedema. Anyway, enough about me. Hahaha.

On my return to our lab this morning I came across a sad piece of news. Sixteen primary school students in a school in West Australia shared a single lancet so that they could test for their blood sugar. Apparently, the students saw their teacher, a diabetic take a blood sample from himself to test for his blood sugar. The students approched him and he gladly allowed his students to test for their blood sugar as well. He also allowed them to share a single lancet. That lancet was the one he used on himself!

Please read about the story below.

It is a big lapse of judgement from a person that should know better. He is a teacher after all. I could guess he has been a diabetic long enough to know that the standard medical practice is that there is no sharing of needles (or blood lancet in this case).

I have seen people reuse their needles and their lancets before. I had a diabetic patient who was complaining that her daily injection of insulin has been increasingly painful over the past few days. We came to realize that she had been reusing her insulin needle for almost a month already and the needle have become so blunt. Some people reuse their needles in order to save money or to put it more accurately because they don't have money. Sad but true.

Then there are those people who have 16 extra glucometer strips but did not have single lancet to spare!

Reference

Tweed, Cindy. Top News. July 2011. http://topnews.us/content/242013-primary-teacher-allows-students-share-needle-prick-finger (accessed July 22, 2011).

Weblinks of the Week

Weblinks of the Week posts will feature an educational site (or sites) medical technology students, medical technologists and other healthcare professionals might find useful if not interesting.

The Virtual Slidebox of Histopathology by the Department of Pathology,

University of Iowa in the United States

LINK: http://www.path.uiowa.edu/virtualslidebox/iowa_histopathology/content_index_db.html

I guess this site is too overwhelming for the student who is cramming for an exam, hahaha, but for those who have the leisure of time and enough curiosity this site is surely worth the visit! This might also be a good reference for reports. Medical students will definitely find this site useful as well..

This site, as the name suggests, is a virtual slidebox. It is also a virtual microscope since you can choose a slide of your liking and be able to view that slide at different magnifications.

There are a lot of slides to view and they are arranged by organ system and bydisease process.  There is also a handy search box where you can type in what you are looking for.

Hey, you can even see the slides.

Microphotography

This is a microphotograph of red blood cells and platelets. The red blood cells are the round cells that look like donuts. The technical description for red blood cells is that they are bi-concave disks. But for me they look like plates! And the platelets actually look like extra rice!

Can you see it? A plate and an extra rice on its left? Hahaha! Try squinting?!

Maybe I'm just seeing things kasi gutom ako. Anyway, I took this microphotograph using an Olympus BX-type research microscope. The microscope had been with our laboratory for sometime already and its camera needs some repairs. Nonetheless , it takes some decent microphotographs if you are patient enough to tinker with its numerous controls.

I just have to mention that we also have a Nikon Alphapot Microscope with a camera attachment. It uses a film camera though! It has been years since I last saw a film. (Last time was during my graduation from college! Everyone of my classmates had digicams and my dear mother brought a film camera, well it was our only camera and it conked out during the ceremony!)

Well, one doesn't need to have a fancy microscope to get microphotographs. I would like to share with you guys some of my microphotography using my cellphone camera.

The pic above is the ova of a Capillaria philippinensis. A dreaded worm capable of causing death. This egg came from samples sent over to my former bosses in UP NIH, Dr. Belizario and Prof Winnie de Leon for confirmation. I used my Nokia 5300 phone camera to take this picture. The technique is to have steady hands, grip your camera well and align your camera's line of sight with that of the microscope. You will just see a bright light on your camera's view finder. Focus on this bright light and zoom in on it! Click!

You also might notice that I have photomicrograph of a tapeworm egg on my blog header. I also used a mobile camera to take that picture.

To end this post, I am posting another photomicrograph. The first three able to identify what it is will get a prize. Just put your guess on the comment box. This contest is open only to residents of the Philippines and the winners shall be announced on September 2, 2011.

The prizes are gift baskets worth approximately PhP 400. I'll send the prizes via LBC to the lucky winners!

L is for Leucchart

Back in college, all the boys would have a funny smirk on their faces whenever our histopathology prof mentioned "L" pieces. The letter L suffered a green connotation back then... No wonder Leuchhart's "L" pieces got stuck in my mind! The L piece is a type of embedding mold for tissue biopsies. Oh, "L"? Don't you get it? I guess I'm the only one here with a dirty mind. (Naku, PM na lang nyo ako kung di nyo talaga ma-gets)

I guess not many would recall it but it was in an illustration on my dear old Gregorios' Histopath Techniques Book. I'd like to share that illustration here.

Not many has seen a Luechhart's embedding mold except of course in a picture in our histopath book! Apparently, histotechnologists found it neither practical nor convenient. But I knew that my life would be incomplete if I never got to see Luechhart's "L" piece. Thus, for years I searched high and low for it. Kinda a Holy Grail for me. Anyway, I located one just recently. Ehehe. To make this blog short, pakita ko na lang agad. Here it is folks.

Embedding is just one of the several steps in tissue processing. It is the process by which a tissue which has previously undergone impregnation is placed in a molten medium such as wax which would then be allowed to solidify. Several more steps shall follow but in the end ultimately this results in a glass slide that shall contain a slice of tissue ready for a pathologist's analytic eye.

Whew! I got tired explaining it. I wonder how tired I'd be when I get started on the biopsies waiting for me at our lab?!

What I do find practical and easy to use in embedding is the metal base mold and cassette or embedding ring. I guess this the most widely used method for embedding around the world. Except of course for our dear country which uses paper boats still. Paper boats are undisputedly the cheapest embedding mold there is. It also gets the job done.

We can get a pack of 250 pieces of embedding rings for PhP 1,750.00 but paper boat embedding molds can be made from old magazines for practically NO COST!

Ref.:

Gregorios, JB. (1974). Histopathologic Techniques. JMC Press.

Prick!!

It was the only title I could think of that was catchy enough! (At least for my standards. lol) I know, I know! My sense of humor sucks! Hahaha. Anyway, I just wanted to write about syringes. Hey! I know its a lame topic! But imagine there is no other topic so universal that all medical technologists, students, practicing ones, retires ones, non-practicing ones could relate too. We could add in all nurses, doctors, almost all healthcare students and professionals as my target audience here.

<sigh...I wish that would translate to traffic here>

This is one of the glass syringes and reusable hypodermic needles that are still kept in storage at our laboratory. No, we do not use it anymore. Lol! It is a remnant of a past. But these old and outdated products are the foundations where the new technologies we use now are built upon.


The word syringe comes from the Greek word "syrinx" which meant "tube". It is a device that has been in use since the ancient times for various uses. The ancient Romans used syringes made of metal for irrigating nasal passages! Talk about nasty! Syringes in the olden days were large and bulky equipment and were used mainly for irrigating body orifices! Enema anyone?


The development of the modern syringe came about during the mid 1800s when various physicians made modifications to the syringe to make it a tool of greater precision and utility for the medical profession. While Dr. Alexander Wood is considered as the Father of the Modern Syringe, many had also contributed such as Dr. Francis Rynd of Ireland who devised a syringe which he used to cure trigeminal neuralgia (He injected meds to the supraorbital nerve! Aruy!) Around 1953, Dr. CG Pravaz of France developed a syringe which he used to inject anticoagulants to patients with aneurysyms. 


If the automotive industry had Henry Ford bring cars to the masses, M.W. Becton and F.S. 
Dickinson brought the syringes to every corner of the world! Sounds familiar? Of course, these men were the founders of the Becton and Dickinson Company. 

www.bd.com

In 1897, BD manufactured all glass syringes that were practical and easy to use. Even in the early days of BD in the 1900s, the company was actively engaged in research and development. They developed the luer lock, the pyrex glass syringe and the first mass produced disposable syringe.


The syringe has a colossal impact influence on healthcare. A world WITHOUT SYRINGES is unimaginable!


I am a healthcare professional and the syringe is my WEAPON! My weapon of HEALING!

Med Tech Wanna-be...Again

I had a bad day at work today. Just one of many. Our performance evaluation is nearing its due date and I am yet to start typing it in. Well, completing the evaluation sheets would be easy enough if only I have been productive enough these past six months.

I am a medical technologist by education and training. Right now however I find myself working for a top pharma company as a research associate. Its still lab work but I sure do miss working in a clinical lab.

Ah, those were the days! I loved working in a laboratory, waking up early to meet the rush of laboratory requests in the morning. I miss seeing blood, mmm, I miss taking blood actually. I miss the zen of hearing the centrifuge whirring while pushing down the red cells and churning up the precious plasma/serum.

Now I miss the joy of getting things done. I work in research. I go to work and sit on my desk  to read scientific journals, make project proposals, budgets, protocol. All this to plan my experiments months ahead of time. Oh, I do get things done (sometimes that is!) but only after such a prolonged time. Sometimes I feel I have bitten more than I can chew. My poor brain isn't used to thinking so much!

Don't get me wrong I love working as a researcher but I love being a medical technologist more. Plus, I wouldn't be a researcher if I hadn't been a medical technologist.

I am making this blog to re-live being a medical technologist. I have always wished that there would be a website that would be a go to site for medical technologists or medical technologist students. Well, I hope with this first post would be the start of a series of poor attempts by yours truly to be such a site.

Watch out for updates to this blog in the coming days.