Western US
Oh, I just love the opportunity to ask questions of people in science-related fields! My apologies in advance if my questions are dumb.
My brother told me years ago that his doctor said he had antibodies to Hepatitis C but had never contracted the disease. (in other words, he’s immune.) Is this actually possible?
Is there anything – behavior, therapeutic measures, etc. – that affects the relative health or good function of the mitochondria?
I would like also to thank you for going into this field. It would seem that good lab techs are a valuable resource. 
Ha! Yeah, we’re dreaming. I think we need to push, as a profession, to make ourselves more visible and really assert ourselves as major players on the healthcare team, before we’ll ever see salaries rise. Maybe the shortage will lead to better pay (for example, my hospital is desperate for night shifters and is giving a big bonus to anyone who signs on for 18 months), but I wouldn’t bet on it. See, we’re hidden. People don’t know what we do. And the lab costs the hospital a ton of money, so instead of cutting nurses or any other type of care a patient directly sees, management cuts the budget in the lab. and cuts and cuts till there’s really not enough techs to get the work done.
Besides, who even knows there’s a shortage? You hear talk of the nursing shortage all the time, on the news. But I’d fall off my sofa if I ever heard a news guy say that techs were in critical shortage too.
Actually, the rest of the lab makes fun of me because I’m always the one to spot something weird in a specimen. Like the urine specimen last week with the strange pink “confetti” in it, that looked like shattered plates of glass under the microscope. The pathologist signed off on it, calling it clinically insignificant artifact. But still, it was weird.
Good luck with your school!
TripleTee - For me, because I was in Quebec, it was a three-year program. It took a lot of convincing to talk the ASCP into recognizing me as an MT as opposed to an MLT, but I have a Bachelor’s degree in physiology to back me up, as well as the fact that a 4-year degree for medical technology just doesn’t exist where I studied, and my schooling is equivalent.
As for pay, it varies a lot, depending on the area you want to work in, but the numbers I’ve seen average about 40k for entry-level. Which is sad, really, because we put a lot of work and a lot of effort into studying, and it’s important work, but we make, on average, about a third less than a nurse with the same schooling and experience. I’m not knocking nurses, I just think that reporting accurate results is as critically important to the patient’s care as administering the right medication (after all, how can you do the latter without the former?) and I wish the salaries reflected that.
To add to Antigen’s comments about pay and respect (cue Rodney Dangerfield), I got the distinct impression that people didn’t want to know about the lab or even see it, much less consider us part of the patient-care team. My impression is that the profession is still mopping up from the pre-CLIA’88 era where techs didn’t have to have a base education beyond high school to work in a lab. We also have the problem of our most visible members are the least trained: phlebotomists. I will never denigrate a phleb, especially those who can get blood from a spider vein on a mosquito, but all to often they are “The Lab” to the rest of the facility. Instead, we need to make sure the lab is also the tech trying to explain why you can’t draw a specimen from a line with D5W hooked up and expect to get an accurate blood glucose. Or, the tech trying to explain that the Dr. can order all of the O neg he/she wants, but the patient has an antibody, which requires longer crossmatch testing.
Ok, enough editorializing. Carry on, Antigen.
Vlad/Igor
What Antigen said. The lab “nurses” are almost always invisible to the public; if you see someone walking around the hospital with a plastic carrying tray full of tubes and needles, that’s a lab tech. Not a nurse. If you have any blood drawn and tests performed, they’re performed by lab techs. And they are as integral to the proper care of patients as doctors, with virtually no recognition (not even from other healthcare professionals often, unfortunately). It’s definitely not a career you go into for the glory.
I can’t speak for other lab techs, but finding an unusual result was kind of exciting (if not always great for the patient). Ooh, look at those cool Trichomonas swimming in the vaginal smear! Check out this basophilic stippling! 
ICU RN, working the 8p-8a shift, checking in.
We draw all our morning labs from either saline locks, art lines or central lines and tube them to the lab.
When I was in hospital two years ago for a cardiac cath, the lab techs would not draw my blood from my saline lock. What gives? Policy?
Re: Saline locks. 2 reasons:
- The saline in the lock can contaminate the blood, resulting in erroneous results. (yes, even after drawing a discard)
- Phlebotomists are not trained on how to use IVs, saline locks, etc and don’t want to accidentally do something wrong.
Reported.
Im with you - even though I trained in biochem before med school, the days where doctors do the lab tests themselves (in Canada anyway) are long gone, unless were talking getting urine sample and checking for glucose, blood etc with the paper strip. As for drawing the blood, it does still happen that doctors get asked to do the blood draws in hospitalized patients extremely rarely, but usually only after the poor patient has been traumatized by attempts at blood draws by the tech, his nurse, the charge nurse, the expert nurse who happends to be on from at that time from another ward (usually hematology & oncology), etc. etc.
Hi… Im also a medical technologist here in the Philippines. If I want to work in Canada, do I have to go back to school again ? For how many years or months? Thank you so much
For blood samples: you mention “lavender top” tubes.
I’ve noticed the various tube types. I assume the stuff in the bottoms of some are culture media of some sort.
Is that correct?
How many different specimen types do you routinely see?
Any so “out there” that your ears perk up if one comes along?
And: what % of blood samples get a slide made to confirm a machine reading?
I haven’t seen Antigen around for a while - this thread is 8 years old and got bumped. But the different colored tops usually refer to different anticoagulants, which are the chemicals that prevent the blood from turning into a giant clot in the tube. Different chemicals can interfere with different tests, so you need to match the color to the test. Some tubes also have a blob of stuff that will separate the plasma from the blood cells when you spin the tube.
By now I really should have noticed the date stamps.
Thanks for the post!
It was the yellowish blob at the bottom which caught my eye. Plasma separation. Cool.
If you look up “vacutainer” on google or Wikipedia, you can find descriptions of the different colored tops. Or if you’re obsessed with the things, there’s a rundown of more types of tubes than I had ever seen at Vacutainer tube colors Flashcards | Quizlet
Which answers the other Q: why the enthusiastic flow from a tiny vein? A: the tube is a vacuum.