People in the Lab

There are two groups of people in the lab. There's the clinical laboratory scientists (CLS). They do all of the tests on the blood and put it in the machines. They're generally a pretty introverted group. They usually have a bachelor's degree in CLS, although some of them are lab technicians, in between phlebotomists and CLSs for training.
Then there are the phlebotomists. I mostly spend my time with them. There are three shifts: a.m. (4:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.), p.m. (12:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.), night (8:30 p.m. to 4:30 a.m.). I work with the a.m. shift on Saturday mornings. There are career phlebotomists, and there are people who are phlebotomists while they go to school, or to get 1000 hours or so of patient interaction time for graduate school.
I spend most of my time with:

• a former teacher in Afghanistan who immigrated in 1993. Her husband works in another part of the hospital, watching patient's vitals. 
• a woman whose son is a genius with machines and is going to the best diesel mechanic school in the country.
• another woman who is Filipino and whose son is on the football team at his high school
• a last woman who's Creationist and conservative (honestly can't think of anything else that I know about her, probably because she is so hardworking that I haven't tried to interrupt her for a long conversation)

I've been volunteering for a year, around 130 hours. I've learned some interesting things. Phlebotomists don't like wet dark green LACTV tubes which have to be kept on ice, but the labels peel off if they get too wet, so they prefer if the tubes are in a glove or the outer pocket of the biohazard bag, with the ice in a separate compartment. They also don't like leaky specimens, like urines for example (sort of obvious), and they can't do tests on tubes from the ER that come in without a time that the blood was collected. They also dislike unnecessary blood cultures (Bactens), which are cultures where bacteria/fungi in the blood can grow so that they can be identified, but anyways, they take a lot of processing. They're not being lazy; they're just buried in work and need to get on to the next specimen. On the other hand, they don't mind unnecessary blood. Actually, extra blood lets them add on extra tests to the same set of vials instead of having to stick (draw blood from) the person again. Speaking of sticking, one time they told me that they love when doctors let them stick someplace other than the arm when someone's a hard stick. Hard sticks are when the vessels in someone's arm are hard to get blood out of because they've had so many IVs and blood drawn from veins. Other possible places to draw blood are the wrist, the legs, and sometimes the neck.

http://ascendreferencemanual.com/ref/images/stories/large/bactec-culture-bottles.jpg

Bacten: aerobic and anaerobic. Blood goes in the bottle. Bottle goes in a machine for 2-10 days. If bacteria or fungi start growing, there's something wrong with you.

This Required Last Thing From A Really Long Time Ago

First: What is in my Genius Project TED Talk?

Genius Project TED Talk Your Genius Project will culminate in a final, live TED style presentation in which you address the following: What was your initial project and where did you end up? Initially it was making a mentorship website, but now it’s blogging about my volunteering. What were the basics of your intent and idea, and how did that morph into your final product? Look good for colleges. Not too much to do. What have you learned about your passion? Still want to be a pathologist Did your passion change throughout this? What caused that change? Nope What have you learned about your challenges? Try to avoid them What was difficult about this project? What surprised you about what was most difficult? What have you learned about how to impact a community? Did that through other things. Who was the community you intended to reach? Did you reach them? Why or why not?

Now: Plan it out, starting with the end in mind.

Genius Project Plan

Deadline	Tasks to Complete A to-do list of what you need to do to complete your project.	Notes: Who do I need to talk to? What’s their contact info?
April 2017: 4B Winter and Spring Presentations to all juniors and seniors	Memorize TedTalk	Don’t mess up.
March 2017	Make Ted Talk
February 2017	Work on Ted Talk
January 2017	Add a few more posts to blog	Start early and plan it out escessively
December 2016	Check in with my mentor Design a logo for my event using Canva. Is this required?	Call (not email or text) my mentor because I haven’t heard back from them via email in months
November 2016	Blog #6: Where I’m at, what I’m missing, where I need to go from here to be successful in April

I'll put a few more posts maybe. I'm going to include making a giant spreadsheet of Rocks and Minerals in my Genius Project because Science olympiad is next week. I'm going to make that Ted-like talk that we're required to do. Really, I'm pretty much done. I might add a few random shoot offs to my Genius Project because I feel like it, such as: according to my random school surveys, my school is 2/3 white and 86% of seniors have taken an AP. I'm very random. Just pretend that this is part of the blog post that comes before it. I definitely have 6 blog posts.

This is my Genius Project

Plan:
This blog is part of our school's Genius Project, where you do something super amazing that's a challenge, helps society, and you are passionate about.
My plan is to summarize what I learned from volunteering in the lab and pathology departments for the last year in a blog. That's about it. I want to be a pathologist, so I am using this blog to tell all the colleges out there that I'm serious about going into medicine, as in, "see, look what I've learned, I think it's awesome!" I am not an eloquent writer, so this is a challenge. I have bad phrasing, I go off on tangents, and I am too colloquial, although I can have a colossal vocabulary when I please. I usually write like I think/talk, but punctuation does not always function like I hope.
In summary, the benefit to society is that you get to learn about the hospital laboratory. The challenge is that I can't write. I'm passionate because I want to be a pathologist.

I volunteered in the pathology department the summer of 2015 for 3 hours on Monday mornings. I'm going to do a post or two about that. Since school started in 2015, I've been working in the lab for 3.5 hours on Saturday mornings. I've seen a lot of grossly awesome body parts and learned a bit about how the lab and pathology departments functioned.

I was planning on writing one blog post a week for the summer, but I didn't. See below for details.

Status Update:
I have done next to nothing so far. This summer has been way too busy, so that is a problem that I have run into. I am also worried about HIPAA, a law about how healthcare workers have doctor patient confidentiality, so you cannot tell anyone unrelated to the case about what you know. I do not know if I signed anything saying that I could not talk about my volunteering experiences, but I definitely signed something saying that I understood HIPPAA. Just in case, I am not saying any identifying information about me or the hospital. Not to mention, public displays of identifying information make my parents . . . uncomfortable.

 I just have to fit writing in with 5 college level courses, tennis until 5 pm, MUN, 5 Science Olympiad events, Academic League, volunteering, studying for the Chemistry SAT in October, writing college essays, and applying to colleges. Easy-peasy. So, you might be wondering why I was not proactive enough to do this project over the summer. Last summer, I did nothing because I was worried about AP summer assignments and wanted to relax. I got bored, so I decided that this year I was going to be "entertained" all summer and take advantage of all opportunities. I got a job as a summer camp counselor, volunteered in the lab of the hospital, volunteered at the library, took an online psychology class, and worked on summer assignments. It was very productive and has the added benefit of making school look easy in comparison. In conclusion, that is why this is not done yet and is going to stress me out excessively, but not that much, because I'll be too stressed about everything else to be stressed about this.

PS Teacher: I wrote this one over the summer, so it turns out that my adjusted plans are the same as our updated blog post plans. The Genius Project summer assignment page was freaking me out, so I tried to write a few posts before school started just in case 4 posts were due on the first day of school (I only got two done though). I think the stress paragraph still applies, though. It is a summary of authentic challenges.

Photo of a lab

Biteable video pitch. My plan in pretty pictures (and a few ugly ones).