A Look at Life

Yesterday just reminded me about the lows of what my job as a tech will mean sometimes. We had someone come into the ER on Thursday night and his white count was at 150,000, which was super high, the normal range is 4,000-11,000. The night techs did the diff and left the slide for our pathologist to look at. Dr H came in during the morning and looked at the slide and said it was a lymphoproliferative disorder and that this patient must be an existing cancer patient. Shortly after Dr H made his decision on that, the heme-oncologist came in and asked to look at the slide. Well, this was after the 2nd CBC/Diff had been ordered and this patient's white count was now close to 200,000 and he had very few platelets. The doc takes one look at the slide and diagnoses this patient with leukemia. He was a new cancer patient. And so he orders some more tests and then says that he'll call about the bone marrow. So, it's the middle of lunch when the doc calls about the bone marrow, and of course we drop everything and head up to ICU. The patient had been receiving platelets and was finally starting to stop bleeding. I felt so bad for him, especially since he was my age and now he's going to have chemo and dialysis. It reminded me how fragile life is and that you never know what to expect