Enforced Sick Days

On Tuesday, I woke up feeling under the weather. I had a bit of a fever, a cough, and body aches. Figuring that I work in a hospital with lots of not-so-healthy people around, I decided not to go to work. I thought I could just rest lots, drink plenty of fluids, and then report back to work on Wednesday. Turns out, it's not that simple. I showed up to work today and was told that because my symptoms were flu-like, I had to go check in with Occupational Health to get the all-clear from them to return to work. I was thinking "I'm feeling mostly fine, they'll just take my temperature and then I can just get back to work".

Wrong.

Thanks to H1N1, the rules for what they send you home for have changed. Before, it was just fever WITH vomiting or diarrhea. Now, they can send you home for just a fever, cough, or any sort of respiratory problem. I told the nurse that, while I did have a fever on Tuesday, it was gone that evening. She even took my temperature right there, and I was fine. But, the rules are that I can't be at work until 48 hours have passed since my fever ended. She also had to take some swabs to send for testing. Let me tell you, nose swabs hurt! I had no idea they had to go so deep with them.

So, the conclusion of this story is that I am now not allowed to go to work until they phone me with the results of my tests - even though I feel fine now. The nurse suspected that will probably be Monday.

Extra long weekend!!

Stressed

Work is stressful right now. In fact, this is possibly the first time I've felt that I may not actually finish what I need to in time. Actually, I take that back. When I was in school, I felt that way all the time, but it was okay because the only thing riding on it were my own marks. The fact that my work affects other people is what adds the stress factor. Oh well. I'm sure that with sufficient overtime, things'll pull through

In other news, another season of PushPULL is underway! Tonight was the first night of auditions, and it was lots of fun. I can't wait to go on Sunday. This weekend is really, really busy. I'm teaching a kids dance class, performing, then going to a bachelorette party on Saturday. On Sunday, I'm helping to clean out some CDW props at Cecil, going to Lorraine's baby shower, and then heading to auditions part II. Somewhere in there, I need to find time to do laundry and figure out what we're going to eat next week. Time to put on the productive hat!!

Stupid HR

For those of you who live in Ontario, you may have heard about this new statutory holiday that our provincial government has instituted. It's called Family Day, and it falls in February. At first, I thought 'Hey, this is great. I get another holiday!' Except it doesn't work out that way for me. Here's why.

Here at UHN, we get 2 holidays a year that they call 'float days'. We can't bank them, but we can take them when we want. What HR has now done is they've taken away one of our float days, and given us Family Day. Grrrr. Their logic is that UHN gives us more than the 9 legislated days off, so we're still ahead. But the truth is I'd rather have a float day instead of being forced to take it on some random day in February. I personally like to use my float days around Christmas time so I can get a whole week off instead of having to be work.

I feel kinda cheated, actually. I feel like I totally didn't get an extra holiday at all. Am I just looking at this the wrong way?

Okay...that was random

So, by now, I'm guessing that many of you have heard that Jason Blake has been diagnosed with CML (and the more grammatically correct term is actually chronic myloid leukemia, not chronic mylogenous leukemia). Well, I was returning to the office from lunch and found a reporter and cameraman there talking to my boss. Out of the blue, they decided to drop by the hospital and wanted to talk to an expert in CML. My poor boss didn't have any time to prepare or anything. It was pretty amusing from our point of view though, that's for sure. And yes, he tried to get the reporters to say myloid instead of mylogenous.

I guess I should've expected some media to show up here at PMH; it is the leading cancer center in Toronto after all. But even still, it was pretty random.

Rough start to work already

Okay...by 10am, I already knew it was going to be 'one of those days'. Today, I passed out in clinic. Yup. Out cold on the floor. How embarrassing is that?! I was observing my first bone marrow aspiration, and those who know me well might know that I'm not the world's best needle person. But, to my credit, I was doing alright for the first bit. It wasn't until the doctor started to describe what he was doing to the patient as he was going did I start to feel kinda weird. So, I thought I should probably excuse myself from the room. Made it to the door, opened the door, and I don't remember what happened after that. Next thing I knew, I was on the clinic floor with a pillow under my head, and three nurses around me. I vaguely remember all the papers I was holding going flying to the floor, one nurse trying to get me to a room with a bed or chair, and then when I woke up, I heard another nurse saying "She's back". We were laughing together later about how I didn't even make it to the bed, and wound up on the floor.

My boss was really nice and didn't mention it afterwards; I wonder if he thinks I'm the biggest wimp in the world though. I mean, I wasn't even the one who was getting marrowed! We've got another donor coming in on Friday, but after I consent him, I think I won't sit in on the extraction (>_<)

Animal trafficking?!

Those of you out there who work with cell lines will appreciate this little story. Here's a pseudo-transcript of a phone conversation that I had with a guy at ATCC.

Me: I'm interested in the marmoset cell line B95-8, but can't seem to find it on your website.
ATCC: Ah, you want to make EBV? Well, I can tell you that you can't get your hands on that if your life depended on it
Me: Oh? [I'm not really interested in making EBV, but I wanted information on that cell line]
ATCC: Yeah. The endangered animal people have made it illegal for us to sell it now because selling it would mean we were trafficking goods produced from an endangered species. Unless you have approval that shows that the only reason you're buying this cell line is because you're going to use it to do research on how to save the marmoset, you can't get it.
Me: (O.O) Wow.

Pretty crazy, huh? In the end, the question that I had didn't get answered, but boy was it an interesting phone call!

Measuring Productivity

I'm curious as to how other people out there have their productivity measured at their workplace. Is it the number of reports you write? Sales that you make? Patents or ideas you generate, or what? The reason I'm wondering this is because I had a really busy day today, but I think I produced just about no measurable work. How did my day get so busy? Well, I showed up to the clinic to collect a blood sample from a patient who's on my study right now. While I'm there, I see a patient who was previously on my study; the one who gave me the deer roast and bottle of wine. So, I stop and chat with them for a while as they wait to be called in to see the doctor. On my way out, I see my patient who left me the blood sample, and sitting right next to him is another patient who used to be on my study. So, I stop and chat with her for a bit before chatting with my current patient. Then as I'm leaving the clinic, I notice my current patient's mother sitting in the waiting area just outside the clinic, so I stop and talk with her for a while too. Before I know it, it's after 11:40am and I haven't even started any of the work I was planning to do.

While I felt unproductive for not doing all that desk-work I was planning, I can't quite bring myself to say that I had an unproductive day. But I guess if you look at my measurables, I'd fail pretty badly. So, what do you guys think? Is there any way for me to get around that?

Really nice people

Some days, you have little things that happen that make you realize that the world does have really nice people in it still. One of my former study patients came to clinic today. I was having a bit of a run-around day with a new patient getting treatment today as well, so I didn't get a chance to go and visit with my former patient in clinic like I usually do. The doctor came and found me and told me that him and his wife were looking for me, so I rushed down to clinic to see them, wondering if anything was the matter. Turns out, they had a bottle of homemade wine, homemade sausages, and a piece of deer roast for me. Back when he was on my study, he told me that he was going hunting in-between treatments, so the deer that he brought me was actually from his hunt. I thought that was honestly such a wonderfully nice thing for them to do. Him and his wife gave me a hug, and wished me Happy Valentine's Day before leaving, and that just put me in a good mood for the rest of the day.

Oh yeah...I had almost forgotten. Happy V'day everyone ^__^ Jamie's still in Ottawa, so I didn't have to do anything for it this year! Ha ha!

Piecing things together

Okay...so the disaster of Monday has turned out not to be as bad as we thought. We've been able to reschedule our patient to next week, and the contamination that we had wasn't widespread at all. I've got my fingers crossed that everything will be okay. I think I told some of you about the crazy contamination problem we had last year thanks to Cambrex and their shipment of supposedly sterile media. I think I must have learned a lot from that experience about tracking down contamination problems. Things went really quickly over the week to nail down the problem, so I was pretty happy about that. Though it would've been best if this didn't happen at all, but what can you do.

And Jamie is coming home to spend the weekend in Toronto, but he's going to be going back to Ottawa again on Monday. Bleh. He's not sure if he'll be able to come back to have Chinese New Year dinner with my family, AND he might not even be able to go with me to the Barenaked Ladies concert on Friday that we got tickets for, like, a year ago. Grr...what a pain. I've also noticed that my incentive to cook or buy groceries has gone downhill. When it's just me, I don't pay as much attention to having regular meals. I know it's bad, and I shouldn't do that, but it just seems that my standards for myself are a lot lower. It sort of becomes, 'oh, it's okay to have a bowl of cereal for dinner'. Maybe I can drag my butt to a store this weekend...