Babies, Blood Types, and Blunders: A Night to Remember in the Blood Bank
A simple mistake almost tore a family and a labor and delivery unit apart.
What you are about to read is the story of a crazy night at a small rural hospital where I used to work… Everything is to the best of my recollection.
“I don’t care what else you have going on,” the doctor said to me. “You get on the goddamned phone and call the Red Cross. Call anyone. You need to help me set this straight.”
“It’s 3 AM in the morning,” I replied.
“I don’t care.”
“Mistakes can happen. Sometimes they can build up over the course of an innings and put people even more on edge, which makes it snowball further.”
— Moeen Ali, English cricketer
It’s the early 2000s, and I’m a lab tech working in a hospital in a rural part of the world. I’m working the third shift, doing everything from drawing blood and testing it, to receiving samples (urine, sputum, feces) and testing them. I hop around from one station to another in the lab. One minute, I’m doing a complete blood count under a microscope. Five minutes later, I’m plating sputum samples to detect bacterial infections. And a few minutes after that, I’m in the blood bank.
