Another Night in the Lab

         It was the first night back to work since part of my Christmas vacation. I only work until the coming Wednesday morning and I'm gone for another week. Lucky for me, something unsual happened the first night back to work.

         Do you understand what is happening in this photo? I am holding a tissue grinder. You should be able to guess what is inside the container. Now, that is not the problem. Laboratory personnel come across literal body parts everyday. What is disturbing about this Kodak moment?

The patient sample had no label.

         This meant I had no idea who it belonged to or what part of the body it was. (Actually, I did have an idea. It looked like breast tissue, but I'm not one hundred percent sure due to lack of information.) I had all the samples I needed for the night. So, I couldn't even use process of elimination to figure out which specimen did not receive a label in my batch. There was not even a floating label laying around in the basket to go along with the mystery meat.

         Point being, this wasn't supposed to happen. A processor managed to make an aliquot of patient sample and forgot to put on the labels. Since we were past the spike of workload before Christmas, I'm not sure we could blame it on the massive work volume.

So, what did I do?

         There wasn't much I could do except letting my supervisor take care of it Monday morning. It may be possible to figure out which test got left out through our logs, but it seemed unwise to assume ownership. As mentioned before, tissue grinders are usually aliquots of patient samples. It was possible that I had already used specimens from original containers instead.

         Regardless, there will most likely be some sort of "huddle minutes" coming down from the boss.

         While this was a terrible thing to happen, it was also an opportunity to learn how to solve this debacle. Then again, the most plausible action might have to be throwing the specimen away. If there are no identifiers, there is no way to assume which patient it belonged to.

         As with all tests, there are certain time limits before the specimens are no longer viable. I am pretty sure no patient would appreciate having to give up another chunk of tissues for testing. I'm sure the clinicians would all be jumping for joy knowing there would be delays to their results.

         This event was on the same level as the lab losing patient samples due to carelessness. It will make people mad. Things like this don't happen very often, but they do cause harm to the patients. I guess I will find out more about this episode later. Until then, there is nothing to do but move forward.