no way this could go wrong:

My job is weirdly structured. There's two oncologists, one resident, two technicians, and me in the oncology department. Usually the oncologists are upstairs doing research (but swing by to advise on the cases), and the resident and the more senior technician run the service.

The junior technician and I would love to be involved and consistently try to help, but the resident and senior technician prefer to do everything themselves.

This is wildly frustrating.

thanks abbyismelting.com

This week, both the resident and the senior technician were away on vacation. You can imagine how this went:

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The junior technician and I had a really interesting week. It's kind of hard to learn how to do your job if you only get occasional sidenotes on how to do it, which is what happens when the senior people are around...since it takes too much time (? or something?) for them to teach us what they're doing.

So, we both spent the week learning on the fly how to do things like reconstitute and administer chemotherapy. Gaaaaaaaah. You guys, when the big kids get back, I am sitting them down and explaining why this was a terrible idea.

Anyway!

This one afternoon, the technician was diluting out gemcitabine for one dog while I was mixing up another patient's zoledronate. This conversation happened:

Technician: "FUCK! I think I mixed this wrong."

Alacrity: "Wrong how?"

Technician: "I was only supposed to add 300 mg to the bag, but I added all 400."

Alacrity: "Oh. It's cool. We can just figure out the new concentration of the solution, and then recalculate the patient's dose."

(pause)

Alacrity: "Why am I only supposed to get 2 ml of zoledronate back through the filter, but I'm getting 3 each time? Something is wrong."

Technician: "Yeah, this is all fucked up."

Alacrity: "This is like Beavis and Butthead in chemistry lab."

(hysterical, panicked laughter)

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