microscope!

So... I may or may not have an expensive real-life microscope sitting on my living room table.   Along with a big box full of blood slides to look at, organize and come up with case studies for.

The perks of being a lab assistant at the university i no longer attend.

I've spent the last two days working in our lab, cleaning, organizing, throwing away stuff.  The lab is all over the place.  Kristin, our new professor, since Dr R went to our new med school, hates how the lab is set up, and i completely agree.
and our old hematology lab teacher made a complete mess of all of the blood smears.  There are boxes of slides, some with labels, some without.  Some labels are just numbers or letters, or a date, or initials.  nothing that makes sense.  i have 5 boxes i organized of 100s, 200s, 300s, 400s, and 500s.  They must all at one point had a binder with the corresponding case studies.  But where is it?  We don't have it.  So we have a whole bunch of slides with no way of knowing (unless we go through each one and try to figure it out).  There are a few other sets of numbered slides that we do know.  So I found all of those and have them organized in their own boxes.  And then there were just random slides that have no indication.  One slide is labled "Sad Case"  Wow... really informative.  One is "leukemia"  okay... which kind?  One is "RBC morphology"  Um,, okay?  all RBCs have a morphology. Not helpful.

So I asked her today, figuring the answer would be "NO", if I could take my microscope home (my trusty # 12), and work on sorting them out, figure out which ones go together, and maybe figure out what the slide is and make a case study for it.  And she said YES!   I love her!

Kristin thought this would be a two day project.  It's turning into at least 3 (I won't be surprised if I end up coming in for a bit on Friday, too).  Luckily my friend Stephanie has been helping me.  We've been working two solid days and we're barely making a dent.  It isn't helping that Kristin is 8 months pregnant and can't help out much... which is fine.  But the more man-power, the better.

Which is why I wanted to take the RBC slides home with me so I didn't have to waste time while i was there.

So I snuck my trusty # 12 in a box out to my car so no one would think i was stealing a microscope, and then hid it in my car and was all geeked out and super excited all day. 

I got some of it done tonight.  All of the random slides are really hard for me to decipher.  I can't figure out what they're supposed to be-- which is really frustrating since this is my future job.  To my credit, these aren't the best slides and a lot of them are older than I am.  But still.  There's a slide labeled "Monocytes eating platelets" (which isn't the most scientific way of saying that), and I spent at least 20 minutes looking at it and didn't find a single platelet getting eaten.  WHY CAN'T I FIND IT?!    I've seen things like that before! 
So I really don't know if I'll be able to make any case studies.  I really thought that I could... but now I'm doubting myself.  I can potentially keep the microscope until Monday- which is when the summer semester starts... so maybe I can do some this weekend.  But graduation is Saturday afternoon, I'm going to Lisa's bonfire that night,  and on Sunday, I'll have Mass and then my parents are taking me and Nathan out to dinner to celebrate graduation.  So the weekend will be chopped up and busy. 

Anyway.  I'm so excited that I have my microscope in my living room.

Oh, and I got my Golden Key International Honor Society cords today.  They're purple and white- which is random.  But I'm excited to have more cords than other people.  Maybe that's snobby.... ?  But I don't think it's horrible to be proud of my accomplishments.  And for people to be aware of them.  Is it?