ill-remembered animosity to thaw into a critical goodbye, or so I fantasize while I work.
Returning to my workstation, I place my materials in front of me, in a straight line across the front of the bench. I set the bag of fluid that I will inject down on my left, careful to point the site of injection toward the panel of blowing air. The upside-down sticker is now facing toward me so that I can read it, and I widely space the medications from left to right, in the order that I will inject them into the bag. Beside each bottle I place a syringe sized to accommodate the amount of the drug specified on the sticker. I double-check the entire setup, left to right, comparing the words on the sticker with the words on the bottles, one after the other, the first three letters of each word only in order to prevent wasting the time it would take to read the whole name.
I take a deep breath and grab a stack of alcohol wipes, the kind ever so slightly foiled within their tear-open package, as is my preference. I steady my hands, reach around the bag, and pull the seal of off the injection port that faces away from me. I raise an alcohol wipe in front of me, tear it open, and bring it down in front of the bag. I clean the rubbery port that the needle is to penetrate and swab the wipe up and back, careful not to let my hands pass between it and the blowing wall. Then I clean the first bottle of medication the same way, using a different wipe.
While turning the small vial of medication upside down with my left hand, I pop the cover off of the syringe with my right hand. I clutch the items securely but strangely in order to keep my fingers to the back, as if I was exposing each item to some holy light. I draw the exact amount of medication printed on the sticker into the syringe, making sure that my eyes are level with the fluid line so that I do not misread the number of milliliters that was measured. I pull the bottle up and off of the syringe by flexing the muscles in my left hand, careful to simultaneously relax the muscles in my right hand in order to avoid losing a drop of medication out of the tip of the needle during separation.
I set the bottle down carefully and move the needle up and over the front of the bag; then I inject the medicine into the bag and toward me. I move the needle up and out, and it is instantaneously useless. I position the syringe’s plunger back at the level of medication that I injected and set it down empty on a tray outside my workstation. I carefully seal the bottle of medication that I just injected and then place it on the tray just to the right of its syringe. I do this until I have used each bottle, and thus completed the recipe. Then I carefully reseal the bag with a plastic cap and lay it across the same tray, on the side facing away from the needles.
I take off my gloves, pick up a pen, and sign my initials in one corner of the sticker on the bag, assuming partial responsibility for I-don’t-know-what. I place the tray in the queue that is serviced by a senior Pharm.D., who methodically double-checks every label, every syringe, and every bottle to ensure that the bag contains what was ordered. If a mistake is found, the bag is discarded, the sticker is reprinted, the whole thing is now a rush job, and a lifer intercedes.
It doesn’t matter that this is my first day in the laboratory. There are no practice bags. There is just doing it right or doing it wrong. While we work we are watched to make sure that we don’t preferentially draw out the simpler orders from the Teletype, and that we use up the entirety of each bottle of medication before we open a new one. We are constantly reminded that any mistake we make could kill someone. The number of medication orders far exceeds what we can complete by the time they are needed, and we are constantly behind. The more people who call in sick, the fewer of us are in the lab working, the faster we have to work, and the further behind we get.
There
Returning to my workstation, I place my materials in front of me, in a straight line across the front of the bench. I set the bag of fluid that I will inject down on my left, careful to point the site of injection toward the panel of blowing air. The upside-down sticker is now facing toward me so that I can read it, and I widely space the medications from left to right, in the order that I will inject them into the bag. Beside each bottle I place a syringe sized to accommodate the amount of the drug specified on the sticker. I double-check the entire setup, left to right, comparing the words on the sticker with the words on the bottles, one after the other, the first three letters of each word only in order to prevent wasting the time it would take to read the whole name.
I take a deep breath and grab a stack of alcohol wipes, the kind ever so slightly foiled within their tear-open package, as is my preference. I steady my hands, reach around the bag, and pull the seal of off the injection port that faces away from me. I raise an alcohol wipe in front of me, tear it open, and bring it down in front of the bag. I clean the rubbery port that the needle is to penetrate and swab the wipe up and back, careful not to let my hands pass between it and the blowing wall. Then I clean the first bottle of medication the same way, using a different wipe.
While turning the small vial of medication upside down with my left hand, I pop the cover off of the syringe with my right hand. I clutch the items securely but strangely in order to keep my fingers to the back, as if I was exposing each item to some holy light. I draw the exact amount of medication printed on the sticker into the syringe, making sure that my eyes are level with the fluid line so that I do not misread the number of milliliters that was measured. I pull the bottle up and off of the syringe by flexing the muscles in my left hand, careful to simultaneously relax the muscles in my right hand in order to avoid losing a drop of medication out of the tip of the needle during separation.
I set the bottle down carefully and move the needle up and over the front of the bag; then I inject the medicine into the bag and toward me. I move the needle up and out, and it is instantaneously useless. I position the syringe’s plunger back at the level of medication that I injected and set it down empty on a tray outside my workstation. I carefully seal the bottle of medication that I just injected and then place it on the tray just to the right of its syringe. I do this until I have used each bottle, and thus completed the recipe. Then I carefully reseal the bag with a plastic cap and lay it across the same tray, on the side facing away from the needles.
I take off my gloves, pick up a pen, and sign my initials in one corner of the sticker on the bag, assuming partial responsibility for I-don’t-know-what. I place the tray in the queue that is serviced by a senior Pharm.D., who methodically double-checks every label, every syringe, and every bottle to ensure that the bag contains what was ordered. If a mistake is found, the bag is discarded, the sticker is reprinted, the whole thing is now a rush job, and a lifer intercedes.
It doesn’t matter that this is my first day in the laboratory. There are no practice bags. There is just doing it right or doing it wrong. While we work we are watched to make sure that we don’t preferentially draw out the simpler orders from the Teletype, and that we use up the entirety of each bottle of medication before we open a new one. We are constantly reminded that any mistake we make could kill someone. The number of medication orders far exceeds what we can complete by the time they are needed, and we are constantly behind. The more people who call in sick, the fewer of us are in the lab working, the faster we have to work, and the further behind we get.
There
Similar Books
