Excellent thread Carol and the info is quite good. May I inject a bit of humor in this often humorless subject?

It took me awhile to get used to living with Karen. She is a histotech, meaning her job is a bit weird. When anything is removed, sectioned, or biopsied on anyone, living or dead in a hospital, the tissue samples go through the lab. In the histology lab, the "big parts" are cut by a pathologist into "small parts" which go through several and varied procedures so they can be cut and mounted (with the cells colored for easier diagnosis) on a slide for the path to read and discuss with your doctor. I am proud to tell you BTW, that she is the lead tech on the main production shift in a hospital lab that does NOT make you wait. If you have your surgery before 5 PM, your doc, in most cases, will have back complete results the next morning, not just the frozen sections. Anyway, she's good at her job.

It took awhile to get used to normal conversation to include lines like, "I had to run down to the morgue and get the arm out of the freezer." Or, "The tumor was the size of a basketball but after it drained it was amybe as small as a golf ball." Geeziz......this is weird stuff as you try to eat supper. I got used to it and now it's as normal as breathing. But it can still be interesting.........

We're at a party and the group we are sitting with are talking about strange things that happened to them on the job that day. Karen generally doesn't join into party talk and we would neither one have been at this one except out of obligations on my job. Neither of us could later figure why she was inspired to speak up at this time, but as a lull came in the chit-chat, Karen said, "We had a four pound uterus today,"

It was like the stock commercial where everyone goes silent. Not a sound could be heard for what seemed miles around and at least 6 hours! It wasn't that long of course but it wassilent!!!

Spaw