Thank Your Hospital Laboratory Professionals

When I was working on my Master’s degree in English, roughly 20 years ago, I also worked in a hospital laboratory. I wasn’t a Med Tech or a phlebotomist (the people who draw blood who aren’t nurses). The job I held was something called a “processor.” Specimens came into the lab, and I routed them to where they needed to go within the lab (or to other labs). I prepared specimens that needed preparation. I made sure stat collections were collected on time. In the course of an 8 hour shift, hundreds of tubes of blood passed through my hands. Almost as many containers of urine. Some swabs from various orifices. Occasionally spinal fluid, pleural fluid (from lungs), stool samples, sputum samples, toes, fetuses, legs, or tissue samples (not from Kleenex) were brought to my counter. Anything that could be secreted, coughed, extracted, excreted, or removed from the human body generally came through the lab, at one point or another, for testing. But mostly, I saw lots and lots of blood.

The lab is invisible. No one thinks of the lab, or the people who work there, who deal exclusively in bio-hazardous substances every day. Lab test results rely on laboratory professionals being rigorous, precise, and accurate with every single test. It’s the only job I’ve ever had where almost any mistake could result in someone’s physical decline or death.

The people who run the tests on the specimens are called Med Techs, or Medical Technologists. A hospital lab is considered a clinical laboratory setting. In order to become a Med Tech, you need a four year college degree. The pay rate is $52,000. For phlebotomists, it’s $34,000. (As stated here.) The pay scale for lab professionals hasn’t changed much since the time I worked in a lab.

Laboratory professionals are considered essential personnel in a hospital, which means that if it snows, or storms, or all hell breaks loose, they still need to come in to work.

My mother worked in hospital laboratories for 40 years. She was a lab director. I remember that once, when I was in elementary school and was too sick to go to school, she took me to work and I slept on the floor of her office. She had to be there. And there weren’t many childcare options available at the time.

Which is important to note, because the vast majority of hospital laboratory professionals are women.

So much has been written on women in the workplace, pay inequity, sexism, double standards, and harassment that I’m not going to go into that here. You can Google it. And if you are somehow unaware of the problem, you should definitely Google it and learn about it.

But I want to point it out because I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this largely invisible, hazardous, stressful, specialized job is held primarily by women who are paid a pretty mediocre salary for work that literally saves lives.

And as egregious as that is, the invisibility of laboratory professionals also means they don’t receive your gratitude. Most of the time, you don’t even know they’re there. And when you do see them, you usually see a phlebotomist. And I’ve never heard of anyone thanking a phlebotomist for drawing blood. More often then not, patients yell at phlebotomists for drawing their blood, despite the fact that the blood work often saves their lives.

Like at any other complex job, there are dozens of factors that laboratory professionals cannot control. Like the availability of testing kits. Or the time that a blood draw is ordered (did you know that some tests are ordered at specific times in order to monitor the effectiveness of medication?). Or when a machine necessary to run tests breaks down, and needs to fixed. Or when someone brings an improperly collected specimen to the lab.

If someone brought an unlabeled tube of blood to the lab, I threw it away, and asked for a re-collect. Every tube must be labelled with the patient’s name, and the date, and the time the blood was drawn. This ensures that the Med Techs run the correct specimen. When a laboratory professional see hundreds of tubes of blood during a single shift, this precaution is essential. If you had your blood drawn twice for the same test, thank your laboratory professionals. Someone made an error and the lab professional caught it.

If you had to wait for lab results, and you had to wait longer than normal, thank your laboratory professionals. They were overworked, running hundreds of tests, and they took the time to make sure your results were accurate.

If your doctor wasn’t sure of a diagnosis, and ordered blood work, or urine tests, or testing on anything that came from your body, to confirm or deny what they suspected, thank your laboratory professionals. They performed your testing, and handled (while wearing protective equipment, of course) your bodily fluids and parts to do so.

If you needed your medication adjusted, thank your laboratory professionals for those test results that ensured you were getting the proper dosage.

If you’ve ever been a patient in an emergency room, urgent care center, hospital, or doctor’s office, thank your laboratory professionals.

If you’ve ever gotten the correct treatment for an illness, thank your laboratory professionals.

And most importantly, remember this, as we lather ourselves with soap and hand sanitizer and don our unnecessary face masks. Someone is performing those lab tests for COVID-19. For flu. For allergies. For all the nasty bugs that lay us humans low (or sometimes lay us six feet lower). And while you see your doctors and nurses and all the technicians and assistants that make up your healthcare team, there is someone you never see, a vital link in the chain of your well-being. Stop and think of them. If you’re the best of humans, find the lab and bring them some coffee and snacks. Write them a note. Say a prayer. However you do it, stop for a moment.

And thank your laboratory professionals.

And Soon You'll Turn 43

No one tells you how to be middle aged. It just happens one day. You wake up and realize that you’ve lived half of your life. For most of your life, your life was ahead of you—a mystery, an unknown variable. You could be anything, do anything. You had so much time left, you couldn’t even imagine living past 30.

And then you did. And you lived further. And some of your friends died. A shocking number of your friends had cancer. You tried to reach out more, and you became a better friend, and you let go of the people that weren’t very good friends to you. And you thought about cancer so much that becoming diagnosed with cancer became one of your biggest fears. And your parents got older, and ill (with cancer), and your friends’ parents got older, and some became ill, and some died, and you felt mortality coiling around you and squeezing. You’re not ready for your parents to die. You’re not ready for your friends’ parents to die. You’re not ready for your friends to die. And there is nothing you can do to stop the inevitable tides.

You develop a prevailing awareness of death.

And you always thought you had time to have kids, and then you found yourself in a fertility clinic listening to a specialist, one of the best in the state, tell you that it was too late. You had gone into early menopause, and the only option was a donor egg, IVF, and hormones that would cost over $30k for an 11% chance of carrying to term. And you couldn’t stop weeping for the loss of something you never had. You wept at your friends’ children, and you wept at Shazam! (of all things), and you wept at old home movies, and you wept to your mother and your husband, who told you that it was okay, that you weren’t defective. But you still aren’t sure you believe them.

Your body continues to betray you, and although you knew it was going to happen, although you knew that things would start to hurt and creak and crack and pop and stiffen, you didn’t expect it to be your left knee. Or the ball of your right foot. Or that place beneath your left shoulder that becomes so knotted that when you hold things over your head, you hold them at an angle.

You expected to have a mid-life crisis where you would buy a ridiculous car or go on an expensive trip or at least get a completely different sort of haircut, and instead you question if you’ve done enough, if you’ve done it well, if you’ve done the things that you wanted. You question how much time you have left to do all the things you still want to do, and realize that you’re going to have to choose between them. You’ve reached a strange place where the opinions of other people matter less, but your aren’t sure what you think of yourself and your life and how your values have changed and how your goals have changed. You think things like if you adopt, is that a mid-life crisis? If you don’t adopt, is that a mid-life crisis? And since adoption starts at about $30k anyway, and you’re already in the hole about $130k for student loans, and you have a mortgage, then you think that maybe mid-life is about realizing that not only can you not take anything with you when you die, but how much you’ll actually owe instead.

And on second thought, maybe it’s a really good thing you didn’t have a mid-life crisis where you bought an expensive car or went on an exotic vacation because you couldn’t afford any more debt anyway. Retirement isn’t going to save up for itself.

No one prepares you for mid-life. No one is interested in mid-life accomplishments. Everyone is focused on the 30 under 30, or the 40 under 40, but no one writes about the 45 at 45, or the 50 in their 50s, the 60 in their 60s, or the 70 in their 70s. And no one cares if you’re 80 or 90 or 100, but if you’ve managed to live the longest, 104, or 108, or maybe even longer, then you get a feel-good news story about how you did it, and you can attribute your lucky longevity to whiskey and scrambled eggs and always owning a dog.

Sometimes, you find yourself writing in second person even though you always hated when people did that. Weirdly, it’s not so bad now.

You are surprised at what you know. You know how to argue against companies, and you know how to demand fair treatment, not just for yourself, but for the people around you. You’re very good at wrangling. You’re fairly savvy with money, and surprisingly organized, considering that once upon a time you never wrote anything down (who were you then?!). You have a strange affinity for rules and order that shocks the everliving ebejezus out of you when you find yourself complaining about jaywalkers.

You seek out seats at concerts and are delighted when bands start early. The idea of being out past midnight exhausts your soul.

You sometimes wonder if you will ever develop confidence in yourself.

You also sometimes wonder if you will ever develop a taste for anchovies. You are surprised that Skittles don’t taste as good as they used to. You marvel at some of the things you used to eat, and are not surprised that your tooth enamel isn’t better.

Your range and breadth of emotion has deepened and expanded, and you feel things now that are so complex and nuanced you cannot find adequate words to describe them. You find a picture of your old living room and you feel happy/bitter/sweet/nostalgic/yearning/loss/forgiveness/gratitude/delight and you don’t know what to call it. You feel things like that all the time now. You are surrounded by this nuanced ocean of emotional sensation and resonance. You are overwhelmed by the constant complexity of it.

You weren’t prepared to discover that old friends that you had lost touch with became addicted to drugs and are homeless.

You realize that your grandparents died 20 years ago. You have never stopped grieving their loss. At the same time, you can still feel them with you.

And you realize that everything from your childhood has changed. Your grandparents’ house. Your grandmother’s condo. The house where you grew up. The magnolia tree that your mother planted is gone. The fence that your father built is gone. And although these things are gone, you remember them, bright and vividly, like you could travel to where they were and they would still be there, exactly the same.

But you can never, ever remember to wear your reading glasses.

And you realize this is all okay. Life is more beautiful and precious and ephemeral than you ever realized. And although you already knew that life was amazing and precious and brief, you didn’t know that life was amazing and precious and brief. Only the accumulation of time has been able to teach you that in way that reaches the bone of your bones. Every moment matters more than you could ever have possibly realized before you were middle-aged. Life has a different savor. Like learning to taste the different notes in coffee. No one told you that time is transformative. You had no idea that mid-life would be a time of growth. You can feel the uncomfortable shifting of being in chrysalis, and you are delighted that you have the capacity for so much more change and potential than you ever knew.

Memory piles up thick and deep, like stacks of books. Little things remind you of other little things, and before you know it, you’re knee deep in the past. And every time, the past pulls you deeper into the present. Into this miraculous, flicker-short life. Into the sheer fantastic impossibility of existing as a being of consciousness. Becoming middle-aged is like becoming a banker, but not one who deals in currency, but one who invests in the daily miracles of being alive in this world. The miracle of breath. The miracle of grass. The miracle of rain. The miracle of motion. You have so much more than you ever thought you’d have.

And you’ve lost so much more than you ever thought you could lose.

No one told you that time is cleansing.

No one told you that mid-life was a time of incredible growth. That it’s painful and heavy and glorious and liberating and sad and adaptive and strange. But most of all, it’s learning. And accepting. And being.

You have no idea why people don’t write more about mid-life. Or make lists of accomplishments from middle-aged people. Or, perhaps more appropriately, lists of insights.

Being middle-aged is nowhere near as boring as you thought it would be.

And no one told you how grateful you would be to be here for it.

And you begin to think that, regardless of the amount of time you have left, it doesn’t really matter. Because the only time that matters is now. And now is all you have.

Now is all you ever had.