My name is Sheelagh Heugh and I previously used to work
in the ---- as a laboratory technician and we eventually got called by the medical scientists.
In this role I had multiple disciplinary backgrounds originally and I specialized in transfusion science.
Eventually, at school I had a bit of fascination about why people were ill
when I used to do Biology and was disuaded from that at young age as ---- clear pathway
and then eventually stumbled on the fact that in pathology laboratories in hospitals.
You help to diagnose people with disease and you also look at the tratment of patients
to see how well they are responding to treatments you are undergoing.
I worked in lots of hospital laboratories that were small scale and multi discipline
so it will be a small team of us and we would ---- around heamatology,
transfusion, microbiology, clinical chemistry, and histology.
I specialised in transfusion science, so I used to be responsible for the day to day
running of the transfusion department checking that we had enough blood
in for any cases that we had coming through --- blood was cross matched
and checked against patients, so in an emergency
we can provide blood for any cases that we had scheduled for operations
and also for anybody who might just coming through for accident and emergency.
You start off and you learn all about red cells and the antigens on them
and then you suddenly realise that you are actually doing one of the most important roles in the laboratory
because if you get it wrong when you are doing a cross match you can actually kill the patient.
It’s one of the few times you receive a prescription from a doctor
that asks for a very dangerous drug and if you get it wrong
then obviously it has serious consequences.
Most of them can’t go over the fact that you have your routine work
and seems to be nice and trickling through and when something serious gets kicks off you can
actully have more people come in and you can be cross matching you know
hundreds of units of blood just suppose something like a major traffic accident
or it may be that you’ve somebody has had an aneurysm that has popped
and you might be cross matching thirty or fourty units just pushing blood into somebody to support them,
to keep them alive long enough ---- fix the problem in the hospital.
The fact that you actually got to know a little about the history of the patients
and a little bit more about them.
I worked in Cypress where we did a lot of work on thalassemic patients
that was quiet nice because you got to see their bloods came in every month
you cross match blood for them and you can look at all the parameters
and see how well they were doing and you’d work out how much blood they needed
that month and you actually got the chance to go up on to the wards
and actually see these patients when we were taking the blood up,
wasn’t really part of our role but because it was a small environment
it was actually nice to see the end user occasionally.
The highlights of it are obviously if you’ve been really busy on a case
and you had a patient who was unlikely to survive when you get to the end
of the session and you’ve finished your blood support
and the surgical teams have done their work and the patient survivies
that is obviously a real real big highlight.
Some of the lowlights obviously are when things go wrong
and it may be smaller case and somebody then isn’t there especially if they were regular patient,
they were coming in for top up transfusions, you feel like you knew them so
when they don’t turn up anymore that’s actually quiet a sad part.