- Hey everybody, it's Teddy, down in the lab.
Hiya doing, nice night?
Just wanted to give a shout out to all my homies in the lab
because we're really kinda ignored
because we work in the basement
and because people don't understand.
They think we're a little standoffish
little bit on the artistic side.
What's that?
Autistic side.
But the truth is, you get to know us,
we're really soft and cuddly.
You know what I'm saying?
Unless you accuse us of hemolyzing your specimen
in which case, things get real.
And what do you think, Suse?
You think you would just have,
we take your blood and we wanna eff with you?
And like we just spin it in the Hemolyzer
9,000 up to 10,000 RPMs just to crush it into
little globules that are unusable then.
So we can have the joy of calling you up and going,
oh I'm sorry, you're gonna have to
draw this really difficult stick again.
Yeah, that's exactly what we do, Susie, that's exact, yeah.
No, have you ever thought
it's because you're trying to suck on a McFlurry
through a coffee stirring straw when you draw your blood?
And you're breaking that McFlurry into little
McFlurry bits that aren't edible anymore?
Okay, think about that, okay, next time
you try to supersize my ass over the phone?
You know, and then I gotta call Susie Q all ran up, and say,
"You know what, you didn't leave any of these tubes?"
And she's like, "Oh, no problem.
"I just come down and leave them now."
And I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no, no."
That's not how this game works, darling.
Because if you do that, that means I'm letting you
put Baby Jane's name on a tube with John Doe's
HIV-infected blood, which means Baby Jane is now on
three drug antiretroviral therapy.
Baby Jane's dad is now in the dog house because
Baby Jane's mom thinks he's been cheating with a ho.
You don't just come and label it after the fact.
You label it properly before you come down.
That's why we do these things, okay?
And we don't make the rules.
We just make the rules.
It's not just nurses, man.
It's these doctors too, man, they got attitude.
And every July, that attitude gets refreshed
when the new residents come in.
And now they do a spinal tap
and they send down the tube with the
like one cc of clotted blood.
And they're like, "Run a cell count on that
"and do all the CSF studies."
And I'm like, "I'm sorry, Bobby Joe, that's not how
"this game works, I can't run it, it's a clot."
"But I need a cell count."
"What do you need a cell count for?"
"To see if there's blood in it."
"Girl, there's blood in the tube, okay?
"It's clotted, okay?"
Have you ever looked up your childhood blood lead levels?
Because I suspect they were a little bit off the
normal gram, if you catch what the bear is throwing.
And then, these residents are ordering
a daily CBC with a Manual Diff.
Manual Diff on a normal CBC every day.
Hello, what do you expect like Teddy's gonna find
some of these, some kind of ghost cells
that are haunting the blood, that are
just gonna appear that only Teddy can see?
That the automated cell counter that does
this stuff for a living can't pick up?
Now, come on man, this ain't IT.
Handmade isn't always better.
You know, and then, they give us Lab Week every year
but like, they'll overlap it with like
Patient Experience Week or Hospital Administrator Day.
And guess where all the cake goes?
Not to us, not to Teddy in the lab.
Maybe the administration brings us down
a Marie Callender's pie to spread among all of us.
And then, they try to have idle chat with us.
They're like, "So do you have to go to school for this?"
And I'm like, "No Ma'am, I just played Operation
"and watched Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos series and that's"
Homie, I went to school for this, okay?
I even got a Bachelor's Degree like some of y'all.
Woo, I went there. (laughs mockingly)
You know, so in the end, man,
we gotta understand each other.
We gotta walk a mile in each other's paws.
We gotta see that we're all taking care of patients.
It's not just your patients, Susie R.N.
or Billy M.D. or Janie, D.O.
It's our patient, man.
It's my patient too.
I care about these outcomes, man.
And if things go wrong, well then, it's pretty much,
it is your patient and I had nothing to do with it
because I'm just in the lab, bro.
♪ Lab lab lab ♪
♪ Bro ♪
- Spinning them samples in a circle, ooh ooh.