What’s yours? ðĪŠ Let’s have some fun and share yours in the comments below. ð
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Grossest Thing in Lab
The Fun Side of Clinical Laboratory Professionals
The greenish sputum I received with a fishy smell ðĪĒ also, I canât stand the smell of vomit
I can tolerate a lot of things when I only see them. But when I smell them, thatâs usually makes me gag!
When I trained in Canada, all techs trained in histology. We had a pathologist that kept putting the body parts in the wrong colored biohazard container. The histologist decided to teach his a lesson by having the pathologist transfer it from one to the other. This was on a Friday and the pathologist had to transfer it on a Monday. It was a full leg that sat at room temp all weekend. I was at the other side of the lab when he did this but it was the most putrid, rotting smell you could imagine. Worse than anything you can imagine!
Thanks. there goes my appetite ðĪĒðĪĢ
I had what looked like a stool sample in a Boritex container. The nurse swore up and down that it was urine. The tech that did the slide said there was too much fecal contamination to do a ua. It turns out it was a rectal cancer patient…highly suspect a fistula. This poor man was passing stool from his bladder.
I can handle a lot. I’ve worked in micro! But the one instance that topped them all was walking past someone pouring off urine that looked like cottage cheese mixed with iced tea. I almost vomited right there.
The worst Iâve seen a few times now are urine specimens that are straight pus as thick as sputum.
Oh gosh yes and the smell is unreal!!!!!
Sightwise, anything that comes out of someone’s mouth ( sputum or gastric analysis/ always had red trash near me in case I had to relieve myself of a gastric sample)
Smellwise, had a purulent body fluid so cloudy that we had to do a 1:1000 dilution for cell count on the old Neubauer hemocytometer slide on the scope. The smell was still so bad, kept gagging. Was still a student, should I change careers now?
Nothing beats the utter revulsion I get when thereâs a pube stuck under the lid of a rectal or gynae swab.
Eeeww ð well back in 2002 a semen sample got lost in the mail in the summer heatwave and arrived a week late. It was super yellow and super goooooey and sticky, and of course suuuuuper smelly ðĪĒðĪĒ I was pregnant at the time and almost died the time it took me to do a sperm count ððŽððąðĩ
Uck!!! ðĪŪ
Technically a specimen…a still born baby in our histopathology freezer for an autopsy. It’s hard to forget…
Teeth, Hair and Nails on a freshly removed dermoid cyst!!! That is the stuff nightmares are made of.. GROSS!!!
Hair. In anything. Seen them in urine, stool, would swabs…..got a Nasal swab with a giant black Nasal hair on it for a Covid test….bleh!
Freshly collected semen sample with clots in it and that smell…ðĪĒ always reminds me of bleach
The urine specimen I got once that was a solid 40 mls of mucus. No liquid at all…..
D..I..S..G..U..S..T..I..N..G!!ðĪĒ
Sputum seems to be winning! As a Student Nurse I thought (mostly correctly) nothing fazed me. Until a patient knocked over his full sputum pot on top of his locker.it sort of slowly spread, and then glooped down the locker side to the floor. 40 years on it still makes me shudder. And the malevolent delight in Sister Hooleyâs voice as she instructed âhurry up Nurse, donât just stand there….â
I once got asked by a male patient producing an on site fertility sample “Can you give me a hand?”
wow so rude! did you? ðĪŠ
someone was doing a clot check, the clot sprung out of the container at the end of a stick and went into her mouth
My first ward I worked on in my nurses training was a medical chest ward and we had to do a round of collecting the sputum pots weigh them and then look at the contents and describe yuk
Ciliated epithelial cells on a hemacytometer and you can see them moving.
Solid sputum…have also had a solid catheterized urine( this came out of a person??????)