Unfiltered Story #238031

I work in the clinical lab of a local hospital. This morning I took a phone call from a nurse working on the oncology (cancer) floor. She had noticed that a smear review had been ordered recently on her patient. She wanted to know who ordered it, what is was, and what she needed to do about it.

I had to explain to her that a smear review is automatically ordered by our instruments if they detect any abnormalities (again this was a cancer patient, normal is unusual) when performing a CBC (complete blood count), which counts the different types, quantities, sizes, and shapes of the cells in your blood. A smear review is more or less what it sounds like, we take a small portion of the specimen, spread it out on glass (smear), stain it, and then review it under a microscope to confirm any abnormalities; something we do to dozens of patient samples every day in our 200 bed hospital. As for what she needed to do, she needed to wait for results to transfer to the patient’s chart, and then follow her protocols or the doctor’s instructions.

How she made it through nursing school and then was hired to care for cancer patients without knowing what this very basic lab test is both frightens and amazes me. And unless it was her very first night on the job, I don’t know how she hadn’t seen one before. I can only imagine she called the lab directly because she was too embarrassed to ask the charge nurse for her floor.