Friday, October 23, 2009
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! ;)
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I had a blonde moment when I was checking out my smears, I couldn’t figure out why I could not see anything under 100x. I tried everything, adjusting the light, flipping back and forth between magnifications, and then eventually cleaning the entire microscope because I couldn’t see all 3 slides under 100x. The AHT's and I declared the microscope broken but......then it hit me.....what if I flip the slides around. BINGO! All 3 slides worked! I remember in high school science the teacher saying if you can't see it under 100x, your slide is most likely up side down. We all laughed after because none of us thought of that! A simple solution!
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Chelsea
haha at least the microscope good a good cleaning :D
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