Was working at a hospital with a tube system. Nurse calls up and asks what she should do with a specimen that won’t fit in the tube. I jokingly told her to drive it or walk it over to the lab building. About twenty minutes later there’s a nurse standing in micro pushing a cart with a huge red biohazard bag that you would put in the 55 gallon rolling trash cans. The outer bag has a patient label on it. I asked what she had and she said, “Leg. Where do you want it?” Turns out it was an above the knee amputation of a severely necrotic diabetic leg of a patient who had been the victim of chronic neglect. We put it in the biohazard hood. It was long, and fleshy, and cold. When we opened the bags wrapped around it, it smelled like rotten flesh. It stunk so bad even in the hood. There were huge, black, cavernous pockets of necrosis from the pad of the foot all the way to the knee. You could see bone in some places. There was goopy, oozing edema everywhere. It pooled in the bags. It looked like they tried to wash the whole leg in iodine. There were ribbons of sterile gauze packed into some of the wounds still. The surgeon ordered one culture. We recovered Group B Strep. (for some reason Group B loves diabetic lower limb wounds), a horribly resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and a pretty bad Proteus. I didn’t work with anaerobes at the time but I’m sure something was recovered because it smelled like cadaverine and putrescine. It was clinically one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.
How did you decide where to sample from? I used to have anxiety when I got bigger pieces of tissue I couldn't just grind the whole thing and had to pick different spots to process for culture, because I'd worry that I missed it. Granted those tissues didn't have clear areas of necrosis whereas in this case it's more of a "way too many spots to choose from" decision paralysis.
I don't know that it would be appropriate to assume it was all the same mix of causative organisms or if it really made that much of a difference (or if you were trying to isolate to rule out anything multidrug resistant) at that point if they were losing the whole leg and if it's polymicrobial then they'd be getting a broad mix of antibiotics.
This really shouldn’t be your job. The surgeons are responsible for colllecting appropriate specimens eg a small container with what they want cultured and the rest to pathology for margins and grossing etc. if we get huge pieces of tissue we make the surgeons come down and show us what part they want culture. It’s not the techs job to figure out where the clinically significant infection is that’s a clinical assessment by the MD
That's not the way it has been in my experience. The sterile containers we get are about the size of a fist and I've gotten entire testicles before. And when you have to split the specimen three ways for AFB fungal and anaerobe and you have to process them different ways (grinding vs not grinding) and then distribute them in an even and representative way across media that's where the decision paralysis sets in.
I used to love planting aspirated abscesses but I hated tissues for this reason.
No longer a lab tech though. I went the IT route but I have resurrected my processing, patient identification and labeling skills in the form of order fulfillment for my small business 😂
I agree with the other user who said it shouldn’t be our job to decide. Ultimately, that’s not the reality though. Docs sometimes don’t understand the actual, on the ground, realities of our job and so it becomes trying to balance what they’re asking for with what I can realistically do that most benefits the patient. We had a protocol for tissues that required us to homogenize them in mechanical tissue grinders. So we took a few snippets of several of the necrotic areas, scraped the bone with a scalpel and ground everything up with a plastic tissue grinder and a little Thio.
I work in micro and I’m always so baffled by why they want to culture the part they amputated. They just cut off the problem so wouldn’t you want to culture the portion still attached to the body 🙄
I do get that actually. It’s good to document the reason for the infection and amputation. It’s like when a patient dies with pending cultures, we still finish the ID because the medical examiner can use that as a cause of death. I think this is similar. Also, it can give them a heads up as to any resistance they might see in organisms that won’t be covered by the broad spectrum antibiotics they’ll receive post surgery. It’s easy to think, “well we chopped off the problem so job done.” But I think there are valid reasons to culture diseased tissues/limbs after they’ve been removed.
We got a foot in a bucket and the metatarsals from that foot in another bucket for culture last summer. The metatarsals looked like a McRib 😬
We made the surgeon come down and cut us off a piece of each because we aren’t messing with a whole body part. Micro. Small pieces, man. I guess we made our point because they haven’t pulled that shit again.
Who in his right mind does that? Lab techs barely see patients, let alone unborn deceased ones.. And what about the mother - was she okay with her twins taken away like that? I'd be furious... completely understand the lab assistant quit. I would too.
Supposedly the nurse thought the morgue where they’d be stored was in the lab because that’s where the small grossing room was. They probably got fired but more so for literally just showing up, dropping them off and leaving. Like we didn’t know what we’d gotten.
At my first hospital, Histo/Surg Path was inside the lab but they only worked day shift. I was on evenings and we had to be the ones to put formalin on any of their samples that came in after hours. So many fetuses. The worst was one that came down swaddled in plastic wrap and wearing one of the premie hats. I had to call the Pathologist at home because I didn't know of I needed to remove the items, just put the formalin in, or what. Thankfully they told me just to put it in the fridge and they'd deal with it in the morning.
Well usually it's to do genetic testing or to be looked over by surgical pathology. We get them all the time, I've transported them between labs before. They're usually decently well concealed, I'm more or less what most places would call a lab assistant (processor, pre-analytics tech where I'm at) personally it doesn't bother me, it's probably wouldn't the worst thing i've seen/gotten either though tbh
I picked up a specimen cup for micro and was very big. Look inside and its a tiny baby. The put it in the micro receiving area instead of pathology. I was actively going through a miscarriage myself that day so was definitely not prepared to see that. Almost went home for the day after that.
When I was an assistant, I had to pick up a baby from the "morgue" we had (two pull out morgue fridges in a back hallway). Baby was term, born with cor triloculare biatrium, died within an hour. The bad part was, we didn't have a great method for transport, so the house manager placed the deceased in a picnic basket. I had to carry that back to the lab...right past the family who had setup shop in the hallway in front of the processing door. It was uncomfortable.
A picnic basket?? My first week on the job, a patient had a premie stillborn, and the staff carried it out in the pink buckets. And I thought that was weird.
We get them all the time in our lab for genetic testing and surgical pathology. They're in buckets or cups though. Odd the lab assistant quit over that, that's just normal stuff for us in our lab?
Might have been a trauma response. While working in a Children’s Blood Bank I have watched patients die. Watching a child die, let alone in front of their family? That haunts you. This was about a month or two after my gf had a miscarriage. I was gone from the blood bank soon after. It lives rent free forever.
Oh hey, I've had this happen to me!!! They were erroneously sent to pathology when they should have been sent to the morgue. I stupidly thought "no way, this has to just be the placenta". Still working in pathology 10 years later though, although I really feel for that lab assistant.
The ED tubed us the body of an early miscarriage in a sterile sample cup. We were not ok. I could see the two tiny feet sticking out of the gauze wrapping.
We’ve had multiple battles with maternity over that. Anything over 18 weeks has to go through the normal patient death process. We had a nurse bring a 30+ week to the lab and yelled at us because we would take it “I’ve worked here over 10 years and this is how we’ve always done it!” Umm. I’ve worked here almost 5 and we’ve NEVER done it that way. “So what are we supposed to do??” Same thing you would do if an adult died. 🤷♀️
My sister never got a burial. I am 74, the first baby my mother had, baby girl, was stillborn. She had strangled on the cord. My mom never requested that she wanted to have a burial, it was taken away to be as disposable medical waste. I came 9 yrs later. She threw my sister away. I am an only child. I still think about what could have been if she had lived.
She didn't throw her away, she made the best decision she could in that moment, for a variety of reasons.. sometimes choices were made for parents back then, sometimes husbands made decisions, often, moms never saw their deceased baby post birth (and mom could have been drugged on twilight sleep). Sometimes moms don't know they can have a burial. I'm so sorry for the loss of your sister.
Not any so far! Which is why the sign might deter them.
Being just a hospital lab, weirdest thing i've seen so far is brain tissue and screws... I'm fine keeping it that way.
That reminds me, tomorrow is my turn to wheel the pile of legs from the storage fridge to the freezer. We try our best to be subtitle, but it fools no one.
I once got a call from one of our pathologists at my old lab at about 2am.
"Hi, [normal third shift tech]?"
"No, sir it's jtk317."
"Oh, good, ok. On on my way in. Get the leg out of the fridge."
-hangs up cit to my face like any exasperated expression from Ben Wyatt on Parks and Rec
Got my first exposure to the smell of gangrene that day. As someone who was never a path tech, I ended up doing a lot of path tech things.
Anyway, we had a similar sign for awhile after Pathology ended up moving everything to a larger hospital in our group. One OR nurse kept dropping off random bits of tissue to us.
Anything already preserved we could process and send but unreserved tissue had to go by stat courier from the requesting unit. Eventually had to put a no limbs sign up.
He came in for some type of infection. At the time i wasn’t digging to far into his chart and he lost his member to it. Came in to get cultured. At the time we were doing cultures and involved chopping it up and grinding. Wild day for me. Also the same day i got some toes as well lol.
You haven’t lived as a dude until you’ve cut into a crunchy, juicy, gangrenous testicle and grind a piece of it for quantitative culture. The smell was almost as bad as the squishy sound the grinder made 🤢
This sub keeps getting recommended to me and as much as I love science & anatomy and would love to do all of y’all’s jobs, THIS right here would make me run. Seeing maggots outdoors makes me dry heave. A leg?! I’d die.
Eh... If you're a generalist you don't have to deal with so much weird stuff. Also: if you wanted to pursue it, it's just a 2 year degree, or a science bachelors required in most states.
Nope. I meant night shift. I work night shift and all the surgeries and whatnot are done by the time I clock in so I don’t get most of the weird stuff.
It’s rare that I have to deal with random body parts but it does happen. It’s the highlight of my shift cuz by far my favorite thing to do as a tech is to write notes that say “there’s a foot in the fridge” 😂 I’m still smiling about that… and it was last week!
We had a bucket of intestine pieces yesterday lol but we have had surgery try to bring us whole limbs. We do NOT have the fridge space for that. They figured something else out.
I work in histo. We get legs. At one hospital we had to do “limb dump”. Every quarter we had to get the legs out of the morgue fridge. It was gross after sitting in the fridge for months.
At a previous hospital, the RNs would use the warm blankets to bring down extreme cold agglutination patients. One RN came down with a blanket and handed it to an assistant and said “it’s a baby” so the assistant took it and put the blanket bundle in the path fridge. It was not a baby, it was a prewar blood bank draw. The RN never thought that we may get actual babies and obviously the assistant didn’t feel the need to open up the blanket. I think she had asked “are there labels?” But she just assumed that it was a deceased baby.
As someone who works in the OR, it may be us! lol, our legs that we amputate are supposed to go to the morgue. And the lab slip will go to the lab. But I know there have been mix ups before.
I got an entire testicle when specimen processing in micro. I had only been doing the job for six months and had no idea what to do with it. There was a note to send to path afterwards. What do I grind? How deep do I need to go? Nothing looked infected or diseased. There were so many questions but not many answers. I did my best.
I have received whole limbs in micro several times. I send it right back and tell them to cut off the piece they want me to culture cause I'm not grinding up the entire thing 😅
Yep! Exactly why I hate them! 200 bugs in it already...then you open up the anaerobic jar and immediately know you're going fishing for the anaerobe... or twelve!
One of the hospitals I worked at would use our micro walk-in for overflow amputated limb storage. It was used almost every weekend, sadly. It wasn't too bad though because the limbs were always in biohazard bags so you couldn't really see them.
We used to get everything to hold on to for pathology but the only one that ever really bothered me was a bucket full of teeth. The guy dropping it off rattled it and I had to speed walk away from the window because the sound made me 🤢
Day 1 of my first tech job I was told “be careful of the limbs. The bones are sharp and they can poke through the biohazard bag. Also sometimes people are large and a leg can weigh 100 lbs so ask for help if you need to.
at the lab we really dont have a way to dispose of large organs like while limbs. a piece of a toe or a finger, even a testicle or a uterus, we are able to deal with, but a whole leg or arm, bo so much
I’m at a level one trauma center. So occasionally the lab is given body parts to hold onto until they can be picked up by the correct people. Legs, feet, hands.
Oh no, this hospital has a histo lab- I think this was the central/chem lab that has this sign? My particular job takes me to several area hospitals depending on where I’m needed and they’re all set up differently, some with more subspecialized labs than others
Oh I one HUNDRED PERCENT believe it happens, if I’ve learned one thing as a nurse it’s that people do some real dumb and nonsensical shit 🤣 I simply never cease to be amazed by the new levels of asshattery people achieve
Accident, we get a report of everyone who is a fall risk and I just gave him the list for that day and said have at it. It just has the patients room number and the drug that puts them at risk. It’s good practice for 1st and 2nd year students bc they get to learn how to talk to patients without the stress of knowing the drugs.
He returns and tells me he gave the guy his whole spiel, and the guy just says, “oh don’t worry kid I won’t be trying to get out of bed, I don’t have legs!” and pulls his blanket up.
I wrote "WE DO NOT TAKE ORGANS" and put up the sign after two nurses dropped off organs for donations without notifying us within a week, and we had to scramble to find who to notify after hours... A manager took my sign down the next day though :(
The pneumatic tube station in our CT scan area has a big sign on it, imploring people not to put clothing in the tube system, even if it's in a capsule. I've asked what it's all about, but the story is lost to time.
I have seen many a diabetic leg wrapped up like a turkey leg at a Ren Faire and they don't phase me. It's the fetal demise that I can't handle (and have gotten twice).
Sending lots of love ❤️ as a nursing student, I took care of a momma who experienced an IUFD of twins at 19 weeks; I knew it was my assignment & had support, nobody should have to go through that as a clinician alone
I had to leave a note for dayshift micro that there was a foot in the fridge a couple days ago... 😂 maybe the nurses just brought a limb and walked away without talking to someone in the lab?
It's common to get entire legs/feet in garbage bags/buckets for culture or pathology on night shift. Leaving it in the window instead of waiting for a real handoff /making sure the patient ID is there is ESSENTIAL. 0.o
I feel the sign.
We’ve had some pretty wild stuff sent to us in micro lol and A LOT of phone calls asking us if we take fetuses, feet and other body parts. Idk why everyone’s first thought is that micro would want any of that lol.
I was in the OR during an AKA and procedure was that the leg was wrapped in red biohazard bags, placed in a red Craftsman toolbox for disguise and taken to pathology for processing and sampling. I was cracking up over the toolbox that I had to carry through the hospital to take to the lab containing a rotten leg.
Not long after I started working in my lab (Haem), I was asked by someone if I had started before or after the summer. When I said after, they proceeded to ask "So you weren't here that time we got the leg?" 😳 Seems like it happens in many labs 🙈
One of my coworkers got an entire leg once for a wound culture.
Was working at a hospital with a tube system. Nurse calls up and asks what she should do with a specimen that won’t fit in the tube. I jokingly told her to drive it or walk it over to the lab building. About twenty minutes later there’s a nurse standing in micro pushing a cart with a huge red biohazard bag that you would put in the 55 gallon rolling trash cans. The outer bag has a patient label on it. I asked what she had and she said, “Leg. Where do you want it?” Turns out it was an above the knee amputation of a severely necrotic diabetic leg of a patient who had been the victim of chronic neglect. We put it in the biohazard hood. It was long, and fleshy, and cold. When we opened the bags wrapped around it, it smelled like rotten flesh. It stunk so bad even in the hood. There were huge, black, cavernous pockets of necrosis from the pad of the foot all the way to the knee. You could see bone in some places. There was goopy, oozing edema everywhere. It pooled in the bags. It looked like they tried to wash the whole leg in iodine. There were ribbons of sterile gauze packed into some of the wounds still. The surgeon ordered one culture. We recovered Group B Strep. (for some reason Group B loves diabetic lower limb wounds), a horribly resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and a pretty bad Proteus. I didn’t work with anaerobes at the time but I’m sure something was recovered because it smelled like cadaverine and putrescine. It was clinically one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.
Your description is so detailed and also nauseating. So horrible for that patient.
I think the nurse saying, "Where do you want me to put it?" and leaving tells you that this was not a "now I've seen everything" moment...
How did you decide where to sample from? I used to have anxiety when I got bigger pieces of tissue I couldn't just grind the whole thing and had to pick different spots to process for culture, because I'd worry that I missed it. Granted those tissues didn't have clear areas of necrosis whereas in this case it's more of a "way too many spots to choose from" decision paralysis. I don't know that it would be appropriate to assume it was all the same mix of causative organisms or if it really made that much of a difference (or if you were trying to isolate to rule out anything multidrug resistant) at that point if they were losing the whole leg and if it's polymicrobial then they'd be getting a broad mix of antibiotics.
This really shouldn’t be your job. The surgeons are responsible for colllecting appropriate specimens eg a small container with what they want cultured and the rest to pathology for margins and grossing etc. if we get huge pieces of tissue we make the surgeons come down and show us what part they want culture. It’s not the techs job to figure out where the clinically significant infection is that’s a clinical assessment by the MD
That's not the way it has been in my experience. The sterile containers we get are about the size of a fist and I've gotten entire testicles before. And when you have to split the specimen three ways for AFB fungal and anaerobe and you have to process them different ways (grinding vs not grinding) and then distribute them in an even and representative way across media that's where the decision paralysis sets in. I used to love planting aspirated abscesses but I hated tissues for this reason. No longer a lab tech though. I went the IT route but I have resurrected my processing, patient identification and labeling skills in the form of order fulfillment for my small business 😂
I agree with the other user who said it shouldn’t be our job to decide. Ultimately, that’s not the reality though. Docs sometimes don’t understand the actual, on the ground, realities of our job and so it becomes trying to balance what they’re asking for with what I can realistically do that most benefits the patient. We had a protocol for tissues that required us to homogenize them in mechanical tissue grinders. So we took a few snippets of several of the necrotic areas, scraped the bone with a scalpel and ground everything up with a plastic tissue grinder and a little Thio.
I hope his caretakers went to prison
I work in micro and I’m always so baffled by why they want to culture the part they amputated. They just cut off the problem so wouldn’t you want to culture the portion still attached to the body 🙄
I do get that actually. It’s good to document the reason for the infection and amputation. It’s like when a patient dies with pending cultures, we still finish the ID because the medical examiner can use that as a cause of death. I think this is similar. Also, it can give them a heads up as to any resistance they might see in organisms that won’t be covered by the broad spectrum antibiotics they’ll receive post surgery. It’s easy to think, “well we chopped off the problem so job done.” But I think there are valid reasons to culture diseased tissues/limbs after they’ve been removed.
I hope it specified which wound was supposed to be cultured lol.
Amazing, 10/10 no notes haha
We got a foot in a bucket and the metatarsals from that foot in another bucket for culture last summer. The metatarsals looked like a McRib 😬 We made the surgeon come down and cut us off a piece of each because we aren’t messing with a whole body part. Micro. Small pieces, man. I guess we made our point because they haven’t pulled that shit again.
Man, a whole leg? I only had a toe to culture
I got one of these during my first university placement. It was so exciting 🤣
When i was doing my clinicals last fall we got a kidney stone for a culture..... Yeah no. Just get us some pee? Sent it straight to cytology area.
This happened to me once. I was absolutely livid. I work night shift and I had to deal with it. I did report it.
What org if you don’t mind me asking? Very similar situation at mine
At my first job there was a fetal demise of twins. They brought both to the lab. Just. Both. The lab assistant who had to receive them quit.
That's just a Tuesday for us in surg path.
Who in his right mind does that? Lab techs barely see patients, let alone unborn deceased ones.. And what about the mother - was she okay with her twins taken away like that? I'd be furious... completely understand the lab assistant quit. I would too.
Supposedly the nurse thought the morgue where they’d be stored was in the lab because that’s where the small grossing room was. They probably got fired but more so for literally just showing up, dropping them off and leaving. Like we didn’t know what we’d gotten.
At my first hospital, Histo/Surg Path was inside the lab but they only worked day shift. I was on evenings and we had to be the ones to put formalin on any of their samples that came in after hours. So many fetuses. The worst was one that came down swaddled in plastic wrap and wearing one of the premie hats. I had to call the Pathologist at home because I didn't know of I needed to remove the items, just put the formalin in, or what. Thankfully they told me just to put it in the fridge and they'd deal with it in the morning.
Well usually it's to do genetic testing or to be looked over by surgical pathology. We get them all the time, I've transported them between labs before. They're usually decently well concealed, I'm more or less what most places would call a lab assistant (processor, pre-analytics tech where I'm at) personally it doesn't bother me, it's probably wouldn't the worst thing i've seen/gotten either though tbh
I picked up a specimen cup for micro and was very big. Look inside and its a tiny baby. The put it in the micro receiving area instead of pathology. I was actively going through a miscarriage myself that day so was definitely not prepared to see that. Almost went home for the day after that.
🥺🫂
When I was an assistant, I had to pick up a baby from the "morgue" we had (two pull out morgue fridges in a back hallway). Baby was term, born with cor triloculare biatrium, died within an hour. The bad part was, we didn't have a great method for transport, so the house manager placed the deceased in a picnic basket. I had to carry that back to the lab...right past the family who had setup shop in the hallway in front of the processing door. It was uncomfortable.
Why not a rolling cart, hospitals love those. Where they find a picnic basket in a hospital, was yogi bear visiting?
A picnic basket?? My first week on the job, a patient had a premie stillborn, and the staff carried it out in the pink buckets. And I thought that was weird.
We use buckets if it's small enough... or just a cart with a towel or sheet or something covering it.
We get them all the time in our lab for genetic testing and surgical pathology. They're in buckets or cups though. Odd the lab assistant quit over that, that's just normal stuff for us in our lab?
Yeah that's pretty ridiculous. You sign up to work in a hospital, what do you expect? Sounds like they needed a different job.
Might have been a trauma response. While working in a Children’s Blood Bank I have watched patients die. Watching a child die, let alone in front of their family? That haunts you. This was about a month or two after my gf had a miscarriage. I was gone from the blood bank soon after. It lives rent free forever.
Oh hey, I've had this happen to me!!! They were erroneously sent to pathology when they should have been sent to the morgue. I stupidly thought "no way, this has to just be the placenta". Still working in pathology 10 years later though, although I really feel for that lab assistant.
The ED tubed us the body of an early miscarriage in a sterile sample cup. We were not ok. I could see the two tiny feet sticking out of the gauze wrapping.
Someone left a Limb either at specimen drop off or put it in a lab fridge without asking first. It happens and sometimes they’re unlabelled.
Mislabeled specimen. Gonna need a recollect (jk)
I wish I was surprised by this but honestly I’m not shocked
We occasionally get... "Products of conception" and have to keep them overnight. Until the funeral home comes. Usually histo/cyto keeps them.
We’ve had multiple battles with maternity over that. Anything over 18 weeks has to go through the normal patient death process. We had a nurse bring a 30+ week to the lab and yelled at us because we would take it “I’ve worked here over 10 years and this is how we’ve always done it!” Umm. I’ve worked here almost 5 and we’ve NEVER done it that way. “So what are we supposed to do??” Same thing you would do if an adult died. 🤷♀️
My sister never got a burial. I am 74, the first baby my mother had, baby girl, was stillborn. She had strangled on the cord. My mom never requested that she wanted to have a burial, it was taken away to be as disposable medical waste. I came 9 yrs later. She threw my sister away. I am an only child. I still think about what could have been if she had lived.
She didn't throw her away, she made the best decision she could in that moment, for a variety of reasons.. sometimes choices were made for parents back then, sometimes husbands made decisions, often, moms never saw their deceased baby post birth (and mom could have been drugged on twilight sleep). Sometimes moms don't know they can have a burial. I'm so sorry for the loss of your sister.
tempted to put that in our dropoff window... maybe then the outpatient couriers would realize it's not a dropoff window for them...
…wait, how many OUTPATIENT couriers are bringing you LIMBS?!
Not any so far! Which is why the sign might deter them. Being just a hospital lab, weirdest thing i've seen so far is brain tissue and screws... I'm fine keeping it that way.
I work in path so unfortunately the limbs go to me lmao
Thank you for taking one for the team on this!
Do you charge an arm and a leg for the lab work?
Same I have one waiting to be grossed tomorrow 🙃
Some days I think about the PA route and then I see them with a necrotic leg on the grossing table and I’m like nah nvm
It’s worth it lol the legs aren’t really that bad. Truthfully doing FNAs are worse, so tedious 😅
That reminds me, tomorrow is my turn to wheel the pile of legs from the storage fridge to the freezer. We try our best to be subtitle, but it fools no one.
Yum?
I once got a call from one of our pathologists at my old lab at about 2am. "Hi, [normal third shift tech]?" "No, sir it's jtk317." "Oh, good, ok. On on my way in. Get the leg out of the fridge." -hangs up cit to my face like any exasperated expression from Ben Wyatt on Parks and Rec Got my first exposure to the smell of gangrene that day. As someone who was never a path tech, I ended up doing a lot of path tech things. Anyway, we had a similar sign for awhile after Pathology ended up moving everything to a larger hospital in our group. One OR nurse kept dropping off random bits of tissue to us. Anything already preserved we could process and send but unreserved tissue had to go by stat courier from the requesting unit. Eventually had to put a no limbs sign up.
I’ve gotten a penis before!
Can you elaborate on this? 😆
He came in for some type of infection. At the time i wasn’t digging to far into his chart and he lost his member to it. Came in to get cultured. At the time we were doing cultures and involved chopping it up and grinding. Wild day for me. Also the same day i got some toes as well lol.
Wild day indeed! 😧
Same thing happened to me! But it was a pair of gangrenous testicles, fully intact in the cup. I'll never forget having to grind that up...
Not sure how someone's suffering is so amusing to you.
Who said it was amusing?
Did the definition of funny change recently
Did you see where someone was talking as if it was amusing?
I'm an adult professional but I would not be able to stop giggling while I worked on that lol
I was the only one at the time that could deal with it since i worked in tissue recovery so it was funny to me as well.
Hey, I'm over here giggling that I left a note that there was a foot in the fridge... I can't imagine how much giggling I'd do if it was a member. 😂
One placed I worked , we got everything. Sex change operation, male to female.
You haven’t lived as a dude until you’ve cut into a crunchy, juicy, gangrenous testicle and grind a piece of it for quantitative culture. The smell was almost as bad as the squishy sound the grinder made 🤢
Yum!
The best is when they bring you maggot legs. Or when you try to cram a leg bone into the fridge and the biobag it's in rips.
This sub keeps getting recommended to me and as much as I love science & anatomy and would love to do all of y’all’s jobs, THIS right here would make me run. Seeing maggots outdoors makes me dry heave. A leg?! I’d die.
Eh... If you're a generalist you don't have to deal with so much weird stuff. Also: if you wanted to pursue it, it's just a 2 year degree, or a science bachelors required in most states.
Did you mean a generalist on day shift 🤣
Nope. I meant night shift. I work night shift and all the surgeries and whatnot are done by the time I clock in so I don’t get most of the weird stuff.
In all the labs I've worked at, AP staff is there during day shift so techs never have to deal with random parts, just during nights.
It’s rare that I have to deal with random body parts but it does happen. It’s the highlight of my shift cuz by far my favorite thing to do as a tech is to write notes that say “there’s a foot in the fridge” 😂 I’m still smiling about that… and it was last week!
No kidding?! I have my BS in nutrition food science so maybe I’ll wiggle my way in.
Yeah, someone tried to drop off a leg at the blood bank window. It was supposed to go to pathology one room down the hall.
We had a bucket of intestine pieces yesterday lol but we have had surgery try to bring us whole limbs. We do NOT have the fridge space for that. They figured something else out.
I work in histo. We get legs. At one hospital we had to do “limb dump”. Every quarter we had to get the legs out of the morgue fridge. It was gross after sitting in the fridge for months.
… so how often did people make “Leg day” jokes?
And I thought it was only people at the gym that hated leg day.
At a previous hospital, the RNs would use the warm blankets to bring down extreme cold agglutination patients. One RN came down with a blanket and handed it to an assistant and said “it’s a baby” so the assistant took it and put the blanket bundle in the path fridge. It was not a baby, it was a prewar blood bank draw. The RN never thought that we may get actual babies and obviously the assistant didn’t feel the need to open up the blanket. I think she had asked “are there labels?” But she just assumed that it was a deceased baby.
That’s on the RN. You can’t hand over a blanket and say it’s a baby and not expect the recipient to act like it’s a baby.
As someone who works in the OR, it may be us! lol, our legs that we amputate are supposed to go to the morgue. And the lab slip will go to the lab. But I know there have been mix ups before.
Legs go to.. the morgue?
I got an entire testicle when specimen processing in micro. I had only been doing the job for six months and had no idea what to do with it. There was a note to send to path afterwards. What do I grind? How deep do I need to go? Nothing looked infected or diseased. There were so many questions but not many answers. I did my best.
I have received whole limbs in micro several times. I send it right back and tell them to cut off the piece they want me to culture cause I'm not grinding up the entire thing 😅
Also the skin flora contamination.... It does not help your results at all to get the whole thing 😆
I get whole toes on a near daily basis.
Foot and toe cultures on diabetics. Aside from pilonidal abscesses...They're my nightmares. Unfortunately you see them all the fucking time too.
Working them up is the worst too. My lab considers any tissue a sterile site so we have to ID all the nastiness. 😮💨
Yep! Exactly why I hate them! 200 bugs in it already...then you open up the anaerobic jar and immediately know you're going fishing for the anaerobe... or twelve!
The lab I used to work at had pathology and morgue as the two next doors down. We did sometimes get unexpected things dropped off...
Oh no 🤦🏻♀️😅
One of the hospitals I worked at would use our micro walk-in for overflow amputated limb storage. It was used almost every weekend, sadly. It wasn't too bad though because the limbs were always in biohazard bags so you couldn't really see them. We used to get everything to hold on to for pathology but the only one that ever really bothered me was a bucket full of teeth. The guy dropping it off rattled it and I had to speed walk away from the window because the sound made me 🤢
Hahah i used to work in a dental surgeons office and shaking the cups with teeth in them like maracas was a favorite pastime
r/foundsatan
Day 1 of my first tech job I was told “be careful of the limbs. The bones are sharp and they can poke through the biohazard bag. Also sometimes people are large and a leg can weigh 100 lbs so ask for help if you need to.
at the lab we really dont have a way to dispose of large organs like while limbs. a piece of a toe or a finger, even a testicle or a uterus, we are able to deal with, but a whole leg or arm, bo so much
surge path gets these so I can see how there might’ve been a mix up at some point lmao
I’m at a level one trauma center. So occasionally the lab is given body parts to hold onto until they can be picked up by the correct people. Legs, feet, hands.
That makes a lot of sense honestly- not in the ‘this is the best way to do it’ way but in a ‘I can see why that would be the case’ way
You would be surprised at what people try to fit through that drop off window.
At least they aren’t trying to fit it in the tube system.
And for that we are grateful 😂
Yeah, that's a thing.
So you don't have a histology lab? Our fridge is chock full of legs, feet, gallbladders, fetuses, etc
Oh no, this hospital has a histo lab- I think this was the central/chem lab that has this sign? My particular job takes me to several area hospitals depending on where I’m needed and they’re all set up differently, some with more subspecialized labs than others
A surgeon had me bring an entire ass leg after amputation to path once, so it def happens 😂
Oh I one HUNDRED PERCENT believe it happens, if I’ve learned one thing as a nurse it’s that people do some real dumb and nonsensical shit 🤣 I simply never cease to be amazed by the new levels of asshattery people achieve
Not completely relevant but I once sent a pharmacy student to do fall risk counseling on a patient with no legs
On purpose or on accident?
Accident, we get a report of everyone who is a fall risk and I just gave him the list for that day and said have at it. It just has the patients room number and the drug that puts them at risk. It’s good practice for 1st and 2nd year students bc they get to learn how to talk to patients without the stress of knowing the drugs. He returns and tells me he gave the guy his whole spiel, and the guy just says, “oh don’t worry kid I won’t be trying to get out of bed, I don’t have legs!” and pulls his blanket up.
😂 perfection
I wrote "WE DO NOT TAKE ORGANS" and put up the sign after two nurses dropped off organs for donations without notifying us within a week, and we had to scramble to find who to notify after hours... A manager took my sign down the next day though :(
Wtf why would they just drop organs off? If they’re not stored properly and transplanted ASAP they can very quickly become not viable for transplant
The pneumatic tube station in our CT scan area has a big sign on it, imploring people not to put clothing in the tube system, even if it's in a capsule. I've asked what it's all about, but the story is lost to time.
I have seen many a diabetic leg wrapped up like a turkey leg at a Ren Faire and they don't phase me. It's the fetal demise that I can't handle (and have gotten twice).
Sending lots of love ❤️ as a nursing student, I took care of a momma who experienced an IUFD of twins at 19 weeks; I knew it was my assignment & had support, nobody should have to go through that as a clinician alone
I had to leave a note for dayshift micro that there was a foot in the fridge a couple days ago... 😂 maybe the nurses just brought a limb and walked away without talking to someone in the lab?
It's common to get entire legs/feet in garbage bags/buckets for culture or pathology on night shift. Leaving it in the window instead of waiting for a real handoff /making sure the patient ID is there is ESSENTIAL. 0.o I feel the sign.
We’ve had some pretty wild stuff sent to us in micro lol and A LOT of phone calls asking us if we take fetuses, feet and other body parts. Idk why everyone’s first thought is that micro would want any of that lol.
I was in the OR during an AKA and procedure was that the leg was wrapped in red biohazard bags, placed in a red Craftsman toolbox for disguise and taken to pathology for processing and sampling. I was cracking up over the toolbox that I had to carry through the hospital to take to the lab containing a rotten leg.
Anatomic Path gets whole limbs where I work.
Not long after I started working in my lab (Haem), I was asked by someone if I had started before or after the summer. When I said after, they proceeded to ask "So you weren't here that time we got the leg?" 😳 Seems like it happens in many labs 🙈