Friday, June 5, 2009

My 'Thank God It's Friday' Moment

I overslept this morning. I have been just a little stressed lately & definitely overtired & well, I just didn't get up on time. I zoomed on in to work where my boss was very cool about things. I am eternally grateful. When I discovered that today was National Donut Day, he even sent me out to get donuts for the crew. What a guy, what a guy!
One donut later, we were in the lab trying to get the second run of doses drawn & out the door. Recently it has been a much greater challenge than usual. There are five reactors in the world where they create molybdenum. This isotope is used in the core of our generators where over time it decays down into the isotope Technetium-99m. That is what we use to compound our medications. Since the moly is only produced in five places worldwide, when one of them shuts down due to a problem or even for routine maintenance, the whole market goes nutty. Right now we are in week two of a shutdown that includes three of the reactors. The market has gone beyond nutty. We are trying to scrape by with about 30% of our normal activity. And Friday is the worst day. Today every millicurie has to count!
Which brings us to my 'Thank God It's Friday' moment. I was working on drawing up some heart imaging agents. I knew that we didn't have much extra material so I was trying to draw my doses as close to the prescribed amount as possible (explanation, due to the nature of what we are trying to measure we are allowed to go over the prescribed amount by 10%; example, customer orders a 10 millicure dose, we can give them up to 11 millicuries). I thought I was really paying attention to what I was doing, but alas! that was not so. I was recapping a needle after drawing the dose & I stuck my finger. Finger was bleeding; finger was radioactive; dose was contaminated with my cooties; dose had to be trashed. Not good times 4. Thank God my boss was able to draw material from another kit to cover the dose I wasted. Thank God also that my finger wasn't too hot & now is almost down to background level.
Like I said, thank God it's Friday!

1 comment:

Jen said...

That sounds like a VERY stressful Friday - hope you can enjoy the weekend :)!