Is There a Doctor in the House?
Looking at the big picture, I could say that my lab work is interesting and I care a great deal about my results and the data that I produce. However, like any other job, the day to day details can be tedious and may get a little boring. Every now and then, though, something happens to help break up the monotony of a typical workday, and today, that little something was a nice panicky medical mini-crisis.My lab bench-mate (let's call him Joe. To my best knowledge, none of you know him well, if at all, so I figured it's safe to write about this incident; I'm just sharing a tidbit of my crazy day with all of you) scared the living daylights out of me this morning. I was just fixing some cells and was pretty focused on grasping the slippery little cover slips that they had been growing on so I wasn't really paying attention to anything that anyone else was doing. That's when I heard this huge THUMP and I looked up to find Joe lying on the floor of the adjacent bay in the lab. At first, it looked like he had fallen off the footstool that was next to him and I my first thought was that oh, poor guy, just tripped and fell. How embarassing. Then I noticed that he was completely unconscious. His arms were pinned at awkward angles under his body and to make matters worse, he was bleeding pretty badly from a head wound. I kinda freaked out at this point. I somehow had the sense to check that he was breathing, called for another coworker to call an ambulence (because I realized at this point that I had no idea what the UK equivalent to 911 was), and tried talking to Joe to see if I could get him to come to. He was out cold for the better part of a minute and when he opened his eyes, he was totally spaced out and couldn't hear me or respond to me for another 30 seconds or so. I was SOOO afraid that he had been knocked unconscious from his fall (he's a pretty tall guy, probaby 6'4" or 5") and that he was seriously hurt or something. You know when your brain works like 10,000mph and time slows waaaaaay down when something like this is happening? Well, my mind was going crazy and thinking of all of the worst possible outcomes and whether I should try to stop the bleeding or should I leave him alone because me moving him might make his injuries worse or I don't know! I was so relieved when he came around and could hear me talking to him. At some point other people finally came around to help me. The paramedics arrived really quickly and whisked Joe away to the hospital across the street. By this time, he was pretty lucid and was asking to me tell his girlfriend where he was going to be and to please freeze his protein samples so that he can load his gel tomorrow. Hopefully, he'll be alright. He was able to walk to the ambulence, so he's probably going to be OK. But dear God, he gave me (and the rest of the lab, since it had just started out as another typical Thursday for them, too) quite a fright.
I would make a crappy paramedic. I'm too prone to panicking.
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