One of the projects I’ve been working on at the ol’ clinical trials statistical lab is a little thing called “Specimen Tracking.”
No, I am not stalking piss-bearing nurses around making sure that they’re delivering the little warm bottles to the right places, though that sounds fun. For many of our cancer research trials, we require certain specimens (blood, bone marrow, eyeballs) to be sent from the patient’s hospital to various labs, where they will do mysterious things, like pathological verification of the disease, or some genetic assay mumbo-jumbo, or whatever. For all I know, they play hacky-sack with the fucking things and then make up outrageous lies. “I need the path review results for patient number 1150062!” “Uh . . . right, I’ll look that up. Here it is. Yeah, this patient was confirmed with scalar cell fuctating baloonganoma.(Sounds of muffled laughter, bong hit.)”
Anyway, the specimen tracking project is a web-based system of logging where all the little damn hunks of people are going and when; sort of like the USPS tracking system, only hopefully better, as recently the USPS tracking system informed me that a package of mine from Amazon had “left Fernley NV” and had “entered US.” What a relief. I hope there’s a commenting system for humorous outlet. Like the time a nurse shipped me several glass slides by slipping them into a normal business envelope and then tossing it into the mailbox. It would be helpful to note little gaffes like that: “Specimen inadequate due to vast, jaw-dropping institutional incompetence. Recommend napalm strike.”
Institutions are required to send lots of stuff various places, so it’s actually understandable that occasionally there’s a mixup. Not that the mixups aren’t frequently horrible and scarring. For a long time, I was in charge of receiving RT materials: that is, x-ray and CT scan films, which were actually pretty interesting. Cross-sections of the human body can look awfully cool, provided they aren’t, you know, yours. What wasn’t cool the day an institution sent along a bunch of films and also enclosed the poloroids that they often take of the patients to show where the fields of radiation therapy are on the body. This was a rectal cancer study. I held in my hands many photos of afflicted, radiation-treated, angry asses, and I thought, “If this is all a part of someone’s grand universal plan, I’d like to have a word with them.”