I have recently re-read a book based on the blog of a paramedic, and in it he mentions that one of the downsides of being a paramedic rather than a nurse is that you don't get to see how the patient does after they are admitted to hospital.
This got me thinking about the downside of working in the lab, we do see a lot of normal routine samples and results for patients who are basically healthy but we also get the samples from the serious ill people. We do get some clinical detail, but we don't get to see what happened to make the patient come to hospital, and how they are doing if they don't have any more samples sent to the lab.
A few times I have even rang a ward with the result of a patient only to find out that they have died in between having their samples taken and getting the result.
I know that usually the history of the patient doesn't effect my job too much in that the result will always be that result, but it does help us to understand why the result is what it is. For example if a patient is on dialysis we would expect their urea and electrolyte results to be abnormal, if we didn't know they were on dialysis we would wonder why the result was what it was and have to double check it and then ring it.
Some doctors give us the full details, which I like, but it makes me wonder why some people do what they do. An example of this is a patient we currently have in the hospital who is younger than me, otherwise healthy, but hung himself and is now suffering after being saved but having caused damage and having had heart attacks. It Makes me wonder why he did it, could it have been prevented, what will happen to him if he recovers fully will he get the help he needs? I can't ask any of these questions I can only judge by the results how well the patient is doing. This bothers me a little as despite not knowing the patient I do care about what happens.
Another example is a patient who had very abnormal results and the doctor rang me (during a night shift) to ask what sort of thing we can test for as the patient had overdosed but the doctors weren't sure what on as the patient was unconscious. By the results we decided that anti freeze was a possibility, but we couldn't send the sample off until the next day as we didn't do that test in our lab. I spent the whole night shift processing samples urgently for this patient and saw him deteriorating but after my night shift I never heard whether it was anti freeze or not, whether he ingested it deliberately or whether he recovered or not. After spending 13 hours on this patient you do want to know what happens but as biomedical scientists we aren't entitled to know.
It's at times like these that I sort of wish that I was a nurse or a doctor!
There are interesting patients that we have at the minute that I want to talk about in another post.
Talk to you later
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