Part of working in, for or with a hospital is the inevitable contact with human secretions. We humans are way too juicy for our own good, and apparently a large part of our system of medicine is to poke each other until juice shoots out and then peer really intently at the results.

Yes, I spilled wee at work today. I have never been so thankful for the insulating qualities of latex. It spilled all over both gloved hands, however, hence the title of this post. Not in the title of this post, the questions raised by this event, such as: What should you wipe them on? Do you turn on the tap to rinse them off, thus contaminating the tap nozzle? And most importantly, how do you take them off?* Luckily it wasn't a large spill and it was over a sink (I was transferring a specimen from bedpan to vial), but it also wasn't my wee. Although I don't know whether that last fact would have raised or lowered the squick factor.

(Do people still say squick? Or is there a newer hipper term for being grossed out enough to shudder? Squick seeped into my vocab back when I spent entirely too much time on the Usenet group rec.arts.bodyart, and it got bandied around quite a bit considering that everyone who logged on pretty much knew that the group was a discussion of piercings and tattoos. To put it another way: is it hypocritical to stick a needle through your own dick and then be grossed out by the needle through someone else's? That discussion kept us all online for ages.)

(What was I talking about? Oh yeah. Although rec.arts.bodyart owes a lot of thanks to rubber gloves as well.)

For the rest of the time I was up on the hospital floor, all I could think about was all of the other inevitably occurring "fluid specimen containment failures" and what if the personnel involved weren't as diligent as I was about keeping the contagion to a minimum. I couldn't walk down the hall from the "dirty room" (where wee gets transferred. Why? In case it gets spilled. I know, I can't stand being in there) to the lab without staring at all the doorknobs and floor tiles and picturing them saturated. I developed this type of neon-yellow overlay to my vision, kind of like when the CSI folks spray everything with luminol and discover they're standing in a charnel-house. Just looking at the handles of all the industrial refrigerators was a decided squick moment.

I think the fridges are the worst part, because the contents are only labeled with numbers, so you have no idea what could possibly need to be stored at minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit. There's a huge line of them along one wall of the hallway, gray and humming, labeled with masking tape: 875, 882, 730. Were I of a conspiracist bent, I'd firmly believe that those fridges are where the government stores all your stolen DNA. Are you an 882? Well, ARE YOU?

I also had the last patient visit of the day, so the floor was deserted, just me, the patient, and the night nurse at the front desk. Pretty much the stock setting of any low-budget hospital horror movie. This one would be called Attack of the Spilled Urine and would hand Amityville Horror its ass at the box office.

This post is just in case anyone thinks research is either a) glamorous or b) paper-pushing. I'm in the line of fire, baby. So to speak.

Okay, I just squicked myself out with that one.

*You get one of the nurses to hand you an additional glove and grasping the folded new glove, use it to grab hold of the edge of the soiled one. Y'know. Just in case you're ever in that situation.