Working with Bacteria

I have been in microorganism lab for 2 weeks, working with bacteria. That really makes me exhausted. As the lab's name, all we do are about microorganism such as bacteria, fungus, and virus. However, the works I did these days are only about bacteria, and it is dangerous. Actually, not all bacteria can cause disease, and only few of them can, but this lab is full of disease-causing bacteria.

In hospital, common clinical samples are blood, urine, sputum, and body fluid. I think they are really disgusting because some of them were not well packed that makes samples leak out of containers. I asked to MT, " Why the samples are not well packed? Why don't we just reject them?" The answer really disappoint me. "We had rejected samples before, but the nurses were angry about that and complained to our chief who is a doctor, not MT. Sometimes they just yell back angrily", said a predecessor. Since then, MT will run tests if the orders and the samples are correct, regardless the quality and quantitative about samples. Doctors only care about the result.

The first thing we do when we get samples is the check sample, patient, and order if they are correct. Then, we classify samples by different kinds of tests such as aerobic and anaerobic tests and we inoculate samples on medium plates. Then, we can wait for the growth of bacteria. After bacteria growth on the plates, we select the colony which we want to know, and put it in a identified machine and wait for results. That is the main steps of procedure, but sometimes machines could be wrong so we would run other chemical tests or just confirm under microscopes. That is really difficult, and this is why MTs is professional. To most people, every bacteria looks the same no matter what kind of microscope do they use, and I am one of them. I spent times learning to tell the difference between bacteria, and now I know a little.

In this lab, MTs let us, interns, practice every procedures by our own, and learn thing during practicing. They seems trusted us very much, and sometimes they even didn't check whether we did correctly or not. Basically, we did everything except identify bacteria and report results. Therefore, we had to proceed samples quickly because there were many samples, maybe hundred of them a day. If we didn't proceed quickly, we would be off late. After my first day, I was exhausted, and late to be off work. Since then, I made myself become faster and faster in order to be off on time.

These days, I learned many things and experience the works of a MT. I have to say it is great but I am not sure if I will be a MT after graduating. Because there is no available for MT, and the payment become lower and lower. That is the worst story that I have ever heard.

Every Times I Meet a Patient

Although, MTs worked in the hospital, they seldom have chances to meet their patient. In fact, they won't see any patient unless there are some law issues. So, I think it is very boring to do the same things with the same people all day, and I think that the only thing can cheer MTs up is finding some new exam methods to make tests more accurate. However, there are still some good things about work in the lab, that is we don't need to deal with patients.

I was at the EKG room few weeks ago. There, I can contact to patients which makes me feel interested. I told patients what EKG is, and told them how to do this test. In the conversation, I feel that most of patients feel scared when they do any medical tests which they have never done before. Being a medical staff, our first job is to make patients feel at ease. It will be easy if I talk to "normal" person. Because most of people know what I said and do what I told them do do. However, few of patients are too old or too sick to understand what I said. It is a big problem to me. I always don't know what to do. Sometimes, I tried my best to communicate with them, but sometimes, I just did what I have to do.

I found that communicating with patients is very difficult. As a MT, I cannot tell patients the result of the test even I know. It can avoid argument with doctor when we have different diagnosis. So, if a patient ask about the result, we can only tell them we don't know. That really depress me.