I’m teaching a medical micro lab tomorrow and just discovered that I only have a few specimen cups. Looking around the lab for options, the best I could come up with are 50 ml Falcon tubes. These are around 28mm X 110mm (1 1/8" x 4 1/2")
As a guy, I don’t think it would be a problem to use these. However, I don’t know how feasable it will be for the ladies. So, ladies, what do you think?
An inch wide? No way. You’d have to clamp the opening right over your urethra, and not that many women even know where their urethra is, let alone be able to maneuver a test tube into place over it and then pee accurately into it.
Even peeing into a reasonably wide-mouthed cup can be problematic; you still tend to get pee all over your hand before you figure out exactly where the urine stream is coming out from (for a “clean catch” urine specimen). It’s dark down there, and hard to see exactly what’s where, especially when you’re hovering over a toilet seat in a bathroom stall with your pantyhose down around your ankles. And the urine stream doesn’t come out in a tidy squirt like an instant garden hose; it tends to come out in a freeform gush at first.
And catching a wayward urine stream like that in a container that’s only an inch wide? Without getting it all over the insides of your thighs and down into your pulled-down pantyhose? Nuh-uh. Ain’t gonna happen.
Use Dixie cups, or styrofoam coffee cups, or something. Or run the risk of being written off as clueless about female anatomy, or, worse, a sexist goon who thinks it’d be funny to watch the “gals” try to pee into test tubes. “See? Boys can do this, but girls [snigger] can’t…” Like that.
Go find some coffee cups. Your female students will thank you for not making them pee all over their panty hose.
Thanks for your reply.
That’s what I was afraid of. I’ll pick up some coffee cups tonight.
There’s also the fact that you guys are used to aiming the stream. A lot of women aren’t- we don’t have to aim to get the stream into the toilet when we’re peeing normally, so it’s not something all of us would automatically do. I took a drug test recently, with a more normal cup, not wearing pantyhose, and I still peed on my hands.
Not just aim but most of us can write with the stream too. You could say we’ve put the “is” in penmanship.
I could be mistaken here, but I’ve the impression somehow that he won’t be watching them.
Well, “watching” not in its literal sense. “Watching to see the reactions”.
Micro, as in microbiology? Are coffee cups sterile?
I doubt that they are sterile, but the samples are plated on media that is selective for fecal coliforms. If there are fecal coliforms on the coffee cups, I don’t want to know what’s going on at the factory! :eek:
Even if there were some fecal coliforms on the cups, the numbers should not be high enough to be an issue, as the environment in a dry cup is not optimal for bacterial survival.