Week One at Ruby Hospital Surgical Pathology Laboratory

I've always preferred living in the countryside and moving back to Morgantown from Pittsburgh has been like a fresh breeze after a smoggy day. I'm back with my landlord who has been kind enough to create a special lease just for myself that covers only the few weeks I'll be here. One of the advantages to staying at a person's residence is that you can form a very cordial relationship with your landlord. Their family has made me feel welcome every time I'm here, going so far as to invite me to their family events. I'm more than happy to oblige. I don't mind solitude either, but it's a nice perk while studying in graduate school. I've become a part of this family so much now that I'm taking care of the house as if it were my own. Today, after they had treated me to a buffet for Mother's Day, I worked outside for a while gardening along the side of their property. You can't do something like that at a faceless rental management agency.

Work at Ruby has been surprisingly smooth thus far. At Allegheny I had become accustomed to the voice recording dictation system and assumed that I would have difficulty transitioning back into using CoPath for dictation. Within the first few days however, many of the things I had learned in CoPath at Magee Women's Hospital came flooding back to me. I have noticed that because of the headphone-dictation system the gross room is a bit more quiet than what I was used to at Allegheny. That hasn't stopped me from absentmindedly leaving my recorder on plenty of times while talking with the people around me. When I turn back to my computer I'm greeted with a novel of words which have transformed the screen into a blob of gibberish.

Another slight difference I have noticed is that the tools that we use differ between each site. For example, many of the biopsy specimens at Allegheny are submitted in biopsy cassettes which have holes that are small enough to prevent the specimen from leaking out. At Ruby, the normal cassettes are used more often which means that many biopsy specimens need to be placed in between a pair of sponges or placed in small biopsy bags. Also, over at Allegheny, cassettes had to be ordered from the accessioner directly because we didn't have access to a computer terminal, but at Ruby we can order cassettes directly though CoPath.

Ruby has also instituted an interesting system for inputting requisitions, containers and cassettes into their computers. Each case has a special square label/code that is assigned to it in the gross room and requires that you scan the requisition, container and associated cassettes into the computer before starting. I think that it's a good idea to prevent cassettes and samples from getting mixed up. Sometimes it can be a pain though when you have multiple containers and multiple cassettes for each container and they all must be scanned. Even though they are all scanned, I still spend the brief amount of time it takes to double check visually that I have the right containers and cassettes.

All in all, I'm looking forward to another week building more experience in the gross room. This rotation is especially short (only three weeks) and it's hard to believe that by Wednesday it will be half completed.

Just your average gross dictation.