mastering the scope

yesterday i spent my lunch break gram staining my direct smears and i was nervous that it would be wasted when i couldnt figure out my oil immersion technique and become discouraged again. :( i really made sure i was getting a good idea of what i was viewing first on 40X power, then i moved up to 100X. i figured out that my problem was i was moving too fast through my fine adjustments. i watched much more carefully and moved my fine adjustment much slower. i found that i could click past the image so fast that if i wasnt watching closely it would vanish! really crazy. i also adjusted the lamp and moved the lens closer to the slide and that opened up much more light. when i had the clear image under the oil immersion field, i also found i adjusted the iris so it was a bit closed and that helped the contrast more. yahoo! :D I spent and hour and a half looking at two slides... haha... owch my eyes! but it was really interesting for sure. i didnt get a patient with wound or an abcess yesterday or today which was REALLY strange (we were super slow for appointments this week) so i wasnt able to make a smear of a wound. i want to make that slide and see all the assortment of goodies in that image! ;)

always remember claws = caution!

i dropped my guard today when my neighbour brought her cat in for her yearly booster. she was acting very friendly with me and i was petting her during the exam and i didnt pick up on any bad vibes or warning signs from her. partly because of that, and partly because i was chatting with my neighbour, i wasn't paying as close enough attention to how i controlled the cat as i picked her up off the table to weigh her. i picked her up like i would casually pick up at pet at home, not how i would normally pick up a patient at the office. normally i would have picked her up slowly, keeping her head away from my body and controlling her front legs. instead, i picked her up with her head facing my chest and without holding her front paws at all! maybe she doesnt like getting picked up in general, or maybe she wasn't feeling comforable about having a weigh-in today (shes 15 lbs... ;), but anyway... owch, big mistake!! she swung her front paws at my chest and i reacted fast enough that she couldnt latch onto my chest/neck but she did claw me right on the ear! it bled like crazy and i'm typing this now while wearing a bandaid wrapped around my upper lobe. :(

the lesson of the day today was treat EVERY patient with caution. they could appear nice and friendly, and you may even know them outside of work, but when we are working with a patient in the clinic, they are going to be on the defensive. it really could have been a lot worse, she could have scratched my face or latched onto my chest. we have to be on top of the situation and practice safe handling skills to avoid injury to ourselves, or to other handlers. if there is anything worse than accidentally allowing a patient to hurt you, it is accidentally allowing a patient to hurt a co-worker. (ex-losing control of a cat during a blood draw and allowing her to strike the person drawing the blood. ughh what a terrible feeling!!) i can think of a quite a few situations where team work was essential to controlling a patient and keeping both of us and the animal from injury!

last week when we were doing the assignment about microorganisms and the disinfectants used in our clinic i was happy that i was able to change some cleaning policies for the clinic. we typically use a product called ascend diluted with water for our table cleaner and peroxiguard for our floor cleaner. i was looking close at the dilution amounts and specifics, i realized that we could actually use peroxiguard for both our floor AND table cleaners. not only would it be more economical and convenient to use only one product, but the peroxiguard actually has a much superior disinfecting ability! the ascend has a surface contact time of a minium of 10 minutes to disinfect whereas the peroxiguard has a 5 minute contact time. The ascend doesnt specify what the contact time is for sanitizing, but the peroxiguard is only 30 second contact time for sanitizing! it makes so much more sense to use the peroxiguard on the table tops especially the exam room table.