Tio

He was just a tiny beige blob of fluff, but he was feistier than his brother, who would cower in fear as he was repeatedly pounced on, and so I picked him. I first thought he was a she, because it's so hard to tell when they're so small and when you know so little about kittens, so I picked out Tia as a perfect name. A subsequent discovery of boy bits resulted in a seamless name change to Tio.

He didn't purr as a kitten. It's like nobody ever showed him how. But he was loving, sleeping on my bed when he felt like it, and head-bonking me as often as he could manage it. Mom was good enough to let me bring him home when I moved back in with her. She didn't want pets, didn't want to deal with the mess and the trouble, but I loved him and she loved me, so he stayed. Everyone ended up loving him, of course. Even those who would never admit to being "cat people". It was impossible not to. He grew from a spiky, twitchy kitten into a big lounging Garfield of a cat who had his own spot on the couch and would sit and glare at you if you dared to put your butt where his should be.

He had no sense of space whatsoever, and thought that he could fit into any box, bag, or bowl that he came across. He'd wedge a paw and half his fluffy butt into an egg carton and look as you as if to say "what? I fit just fine. Screw you." The dryer, Coke 12-pack boxes, stew pots, anything was a cat bed. He loved shoeboxes, especially the ones that were just too small for him, so he'd ooze over the top like a fluffy muffin. We took to leaving one on the kitchen table like a centerpiece, because he would howl and cry if his box was ever missing.


He watched hockey with us, curled up in his spot on the couch or on my brother's recliner. I think he was a goalie in a past life, because he loved swatting balled-up paper missiles out of the air when we tossed them at him. When I'd get ready for late class in the morning, I would turn on PBS for the kids' cartoons, just for easy background noise, and Tio came running every time he heard Clifford The Big Red Dog come on the TV. I swear he was watching it, too. Oh, and the restaurant scene in Men in Black, where the jeweler's cat meows - it freaked him out every time because he kept trying to figure out where the strange cat was hiding. No other cat noises from TV commercials ever got that reaction from him, but the Men In Black cat always did.

He loved tuna. We discovered his love for it when Mom was making a tuna sandwich and Tio tried to climb her for a taste of it. So, being a good cat-mommy, she bought him some tuna on sale at the grocery store, he refused it. Only the expensive albacore tuna packed in oil for our Tio; otherwise, he tried to bury it like it was poop in his litter box. He did that to everything he didn't like. If he sniffed my nails after I painted them, he would try to bury them, too. Whatever it was, he'd position himself over it and swipe one paw at the table or floor over and over, occasionally looking back to see if the offending item was buried under the imaginary litter yet.

We played hide and seek a lot, with pouncing. I'd hide around a corner and then just as he was coming to get me I'd pounce on him and he'd tear off down the hall and turn around a corner, to wait and do the same to me. He'd bring you his rattle mouse if he wanted you to throw it, but he'd only bring it part of the way back before dropping it for you, always just out of reach. The stinker. And he loved to transport socks around the house. Folded, balled-up socks - he would carry them like they were kittens, and move a pile of them from one place to another. He always helped us change the sheets on the bed, by getting in between the layers and batting at them viciously. But when it was time for sleeping, he would make his rounds and make sure everyone got a little Tio time before they fell asleep.



I believe he loved all of us equally, but he really became Mom's cat when I moved to the states. I wanted to take him with me so badly, but he was already a middle-aged cat who didn't like change, and the immigration mess was hard enough to figure uot without worrying about bringing an animal across the border. Besides, I knew how much he meant to my mom and my brother, and it didn't seem fair to hurt them and traumatize Tio, so I said goodbye and left the country. He always remembered me when I visited, though, sniffing me once to confirm my identity and then flopping over for the required belly rub. Seeing his connection with Mom every time I visited helped me feel better about leaving him. Those two shared a wavelength and it was special. He sat with her while she had her morning coffee, coming right up to her face for nuzzles and bonks and kisses. He splayed himself over anything she tried to read, begging for attention. We joked that he was asking "attention me!" and we did, always.

He would have been 12 years old this fall. He had a seizure last year, and recovered, but he was never the same. He had some digestive issues, and he was always sick and seemed to be in pain. They couldn't find anything wrong with him, and it wasn't fair to let him keep on fighting through misery so he could have those few moments of love in between. It was a hard and brave decision for Mom to make on her own, and I think she did the right thing. It's very hard on me that I didn't get to say goodbye, but life isn't always fair that way.

I'll miss you, Tio. I hope you get to be a goalie on one of heaven's cat hockey teams. I'm going to give Animal, Mojo, and Horton a can of tuna - the good stuff - in your honor.

Can I give blood?

Another blood post! I'm really trying to increase the percentage of posts about the lab tech life, because I know some of my regular readers are interested, and I also think it's important to boost awareness about the profession.

I think I've mentioned this before: I am the hospital's recruiter for our regular blood drives. This means I wander the hospital, clipboard in hand, and ask people if they would like to make an appointment to donate blood. Some people avoid eye contact, as though I worked for that irritating booth at the mall where a young employee chases you down with hand lotion samples. Made with real Dead Sea kelp! Some people will answer me with a shake of the head and little more, but often I will hear reasons why they cannot or will not donate.

Some people are afraid of needles. And you know what? I don't push them. A fear is a fear, and I'm not going to get aggressive and call them sissies (well, ok, it depends how well I know them) because they have a terrible fear of needles. I sometimes take a second and reassure them that it's not painful beyond the hemoglobin check, for which they prick your finger, and the insertion of the needle in your arm. Once it's in, you don't really feel any pain. But if you're going to faint or scream when the needle comes at you, then you've got a good excuse to not come by. Maybe send a friend in your place, though? One who's not a chicken? I kid, I kid...

A lot of people say they'd love to donate but they just got a piercing or a tattoo. The rules were fairly recently revamped on that front, so if you had the work done in a state where tattoo parlours and piercing shacks are regulated, you're good to donate immediately. If unregulated, it's a twelve-month wait before you're allowed to donate again. The wait is because of the risk that you may have been exposed to hepatitis through used equipment, and twelve months is long enough for you to have gotten sick and found out about the exposure, or for the virus and/or antibodies to be present in your blood so they can show up when it's tested.

Travel is another big reason for deferral. You need to wait twelve months after visiting any area where malaria is endemic (normally present), which, unfortunately, is a whole lot of fun places to visit, including a lot of Asia, Africa, and Central America. So that Caribbean cruise to Mexico will take you out of the donor pool for a year.

Note: these criteria apply to the United States, more specifically the American Red Cross eligibility criteria. I do not claim to be an expert on these rules, so please refer to the ARC website for clarification. There's a phone number you can call if you have more specific questions.

It might happen that you study these rules carefully and decide you're eligible, and you show up to a blood drive, and a Red Cross employee tells you that you are actually ineligible. Maybe they're right, maybe you overlooked something. But they're human too, and there are a lot of rules to keep straight, and it's possible that they're wrong. Take the example of a person with a chronic medical condition, like Crohn's disease. The website says that well-managed chronic medical conditions, in general, are not reason for donation deferral. It's possible that a medication you're taking, or a medical procedure you've had recently, is what's actually taking you out of the pool, but maybe the Red Cross tech has never encountered Crohn's before and is trying to err on the side of caution.

This happened to a friend of a friend who had donated several times in the past with no problems, and I was asked what he should have done in this situation. I would have asked to speak to a supervisor and to see the eligibility criteria and I would want to know what about my condition made me ineligible. Was it out of possible risk to the recipients of my blood or was it because of apprehension about what a donation would do to me, someone with a chronic condition? Either way, I would have pressed the issue a little, because I know how valuable a blood donation is. It might make sense, if you're encountering problems like this, to try donating at a blood center instead of a random blood drive, because you're more likely to have access to a supervisor there.

So, go read the eligibility criteria! Get educated, and go give some blood!

Blood Bank Regulars

Someone mentioned to me that I need to post more about work and the blood bank, so I'm going to try. I'm not sure what people are interested in, and I don't know how technical to get before they give up and get frustrated and go look for videos of cats on Roombas instead, but I'm going to start somewhere and hope that people comment to guide me.

We have regulars at our blood bank. Safe in the basement of the hospital, where all good med techs belong, we crack jokes about them needing loyalty cards - get a punch for each unit of blood transfused and the tenth unit is on us. We never see the patients - we get their blood, type it and check for antibodies, crossmatch some suitable units from our supply, and send the blood up to the infusion center, the emergency room, or the hospital floors. But even without meeting these patients, we get to know some of them, whether we want to or not, especially those who have chronic conditions that bring them back week after week for scheduled transfusions. Or those with "problems" that make it hard for us to find them safe and compatible blood - when we see an order print down in the blood bank, and we recognize the name, it's not usually good. Impending doom is probably how I'd describe the feeling.

Like Mrs. B, who's up to 550 units over her lifetime and still going strong. She has a bleeding disorder, and her own body can't keep up with the blood loss, so she comes in for weekly transfusions. Because of all of these exposures to foreign blood, she's developed a couple of antibodies, and because of the specific ones she's developed, we need to get her special compatible units from the Red Cross. Sometimes she has a bad bleeding episode and comes in through the emergency room because she can't wait until her appointment, so we always make sure to have at least two units aside in the blood bank, tagged with "Save for Mrs B", so that in a crisis we can at least get her started with something while we get more shipped in from the Red Cross.

Or Mrs. M, who has such strong auto-antibodies that her cells clump together as soon as they come out of her body into a specimen tube, making it impossible to discern her blood type. We have to give her Type O blood because we just can't tease her blood type from her cells and plasma. We tried asking the nurses to preheat the specimen tubes and to bring them to the blood bank on a warmer or in a cup of hot water, but even that hasn't been enough to fix the problem.

One of our regulars passed away recently, and it depressed all of us. We'd been supporting her through regular transfusions for over two years. Over the course of those years, she developed more and more antibodies, making her case a complex one requiring a few hours of work from a dedicated tech each time she'd come in, and specially-typed units from the reference lab at the Red Cross for transfusion. We'd all grumble when we saw her orders come across the printer, and argue a little over who worked on it last time and whose turn it was, but we were all glad to be doing something to help this woman enjoy more time on this Earth with her family. Hearing that she was never coming back was a little hard on all of us.

We don't always find out what happens to the patients, because of privacy rules. Sometimes we suddenly stop seeing a patient, and we don't know if it's because they got better, got transferred, or passed on. It's very hard sometimes to have worked hard in the blood bank to help keep someone alive, and then not know if it succeeded. But by the time you start worrying about it, another patient comes in, so you just keep going.

Jen's Library: In The Devil's Garden

In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food
by Stewart Lee Allen

Oh, how I love these "history of this or that" books. If there is a book on display at the library, and the cover declares it to be a history of some random object, process, or concept, I will pick it up. I've rarely been disappointed.

In The Devil's Garden covers the history of foods that have been forbidden at one time or another to certain people. Let them eat cake! The author has playfully split the book up into seven parts, for the seven deadly sins, because, after all, if something is forbidden it's generally because someone has decided it's bad for you. The distinctions don't always hold up, because there's a lot of overlap between the sins. Depending who you are, eating a "Trojan Pig", a whole roast pig stuffed with other meats and sausages, can be both gluttony and blasphemy. Incidentally, I am adding "successfully constructing a turducken" to my list of things to do before I die.

The book covers everything from the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden (which, by the way, was not likely an apple - the Christians threw an apple into the story to discredit the sacred fruit of the Celts), to the cultural and religious taboos against eating pork, cows, and dogs. Roman feasts, Aztec human sacrifice, and absinthe - the book is a little disjointed because there's no clear beginning or end, and he jumps from one food to another, sometimes bringing up the same food twice in different places, making it hard to keep track of everything, but it's definitely entertaining and I'd recommend it if you're looking for a lighter non-fiction book. Splitting it up into sections like he did makes it easy to put down and pick up again later. My only major complaint is the lack of references. There's a bibliography but no foot- or end-notes, so you can't easily track down where he got all his information. I'm a stickler for knowing where the facts are coming from.

Shift of Perspective

I enjoy stability. I like routine. A schedule. A plan. I like knowing what is expected of me, where I'm supposed to be at what time, and what I'll be doing there. I don't go so far as to declare Tuesday night meatloaf night for all eternity, but I like knowing I will come home on Tuesdays, check email, and then cook dinner while watching bad TV.

Things are changing at work, and it's forcing me to reset my comfy routines. For over two years, I was working a split shift, where I came in at noon and covered the day shift during their lunch breaks, and left at 8:30 pm after covering half of the evening shift. I loved it because I never had to wake up before the sun did, and I had time in the evening to cook meals more involved than frozen pizzas. But things change, and that position no longer exists.

In December, the decision was made to split the blood bank off from the core lab and staff it separately with two dedicated blood bankers on the evening shift, because the workload was getting to be unmanageable for just one tech. At the time, the evening shift techs, who are generalists trained in all areas of the lab including the blood bank, would rotate stations in the lab and find themselves in blood bank, helping me, one week a month. Unfortunately, because of staffing problems, the reality was that I was often completely alone in the blood bank, trying to do too many things at once, and having difficulty getting anyone to come back and help me because they were also busy and usually short a tech or two thanks to people quitting or calling out sick. I don't hold it against them - everyone was trying to do too much with too little and that's why this big decision was made, for the good of the lab and for better patient care.

We used to have a handful of specimens for the blood bank each night, but as the hospital grew, so did the workload. The emergency room is incredibly busy, labor and delivery is churning out 3 or 4 babies a day, and surgeries are happening later and later into the evening, so having two people in the blood bank all evening makes a lot of sense, and will be better for the hospital and for the poor techs staffing it!

When the change was announced, they asked me if I would go to evening shift, but it wasn't really a choice. My split shift was going to disappear, and the only spot open for me was the new full-time evening shift (created by yanking my shift over by three hours). I considered other jobs, and even applied for a couple, but in the end I decided I am comfy where I am. I like the work, I like the location, and I like most of the people I work with. A day shift position became available and I could have applied for that, but with those hours, there would have been an even bigger adjustment to make. So for better or for worse, I moved to my new shift this week, dreading it because of the disruption of my daily routines. How will I come home and cook at midnight? Will I ever see my husband? I will work all that out in time. I've got plans to use the crockpot more often, or leave casseroles in the fridge with instructions for my man to stuff them into the oven before I get home. Maybe I'll get more housework done in the mornings now. I just need a little time and it will all smooth out.

Yesterday was my first shift, and I am now sure that I made the right decision. It may be rocky for a while as I figure out what to do with myself all day, but the evening shift techs hired to work by my side are excellent techs with more experience than me, and they're also great women I can get along with when we're not busting our butts trying to keep people alive. Also, I had forgotten how much fun the other evening shift people are. This will all work out.

What's for Dinner - One Pot Mac and Cheese

It has happened. I have found the perfect mac & cheese recipe. I thought for sure it would take me several years of recipe testing before I finally stumbled on the cheesy holy grail, but this recipe fell into my lap (well, my Gmail chat window) recently and I am happy enough to end my search right here.

Like the caramelized onions, this recipe comes from someone's blog. This is One Pot, Stove Top, Creamy Mac and Cheese from White On Rice Couple, and they completely nailed mac & cheese. I'm talking out-of-the-park, 110% deliciousness here. I could decide to never try another mac and cheese recipe in my whole life and would likely not have any deathbed regrets.


The magic? Cooking the noodles in the milk. Genius! It keeps things super creamy, and it also keeps cleanup easy since you're only using one pot. They warn you to stay nearby and stir constantly, and I will back that up. I let it sit for 30 seconds while I grated cheese, and got a layer of scorched milk - it happens quickly and you need to stay around and watch. My only change to the recipe was my noodle choice - I went with mini spirals because they were adorable. I needed to add more milk near the end, because the pasta soaked a lot up, but that may happen with any noodle type, I'm not sure. I love their recipe, because it's so flexible. Need more milk? Dump it in. Cheese? Whatever you've got, nobody's here to judge you. I used a mix of one part asiago to three parts monterey jack, and it was perfect. I'm actually nervous about changing up the cheeses, because this combination worked so well!

Making it superperfect, though, was a simple matter of adding caramelized onions to the bowl. I suspect bacon would have a similar effect.

Four Leaf Clover

I have never had a difficult time finding four-leafed clovers. I don't understand why they're considered to be so rare and mysterious. I just look down into the grass, and there they are, waving at me with their supernumerary leaves. It's truly a gift. One summer, while I sat in a soccer field with a book trying to avoid the lame activities of the day camp I was coerced into attending, I found dozens of them, and pressed them all flat in a big poetry book so I could keep them forever. I had plans to try and preserve them somehow but never got around to it, and as time passed they got brittle and started to crumble. There's a moral in there somewhere.

I found a perfect specimen in the lawn of our new house before we moved in.

I'm not sure whether the little guy brought us good luck - with all the crises and issues we've had here so far, I could accuse it of being a bad luck charm, but the fact is we've been happy in this house despite all the work and frustration, so I can't say we've had a horrible time of it. Maybe the clover didn't bring us good luck so much as dilute the bad.

I found a fresh one today, and I gave it to a friend who needs it more than I do. I hope that passing it on will help retain more of its lucky properties, and she'll get the full benefit of the clovery magic.

Caramelized Onions, Crockpot-Style

Caramelized onions are incredibly delicious. All sweet and squishy and tasting nothing like the crunchy raw onions they come from. Food chemistry in action, people! But they take a while to cook properly. And a lot of stirring. I am too lazy to bother with that process most of the time, so I rarely eat caramelized onions.

This is where my crockpot saves the day.

I found this great recipe on a blog called Island Vittles, and I am never going back. To the old way of making caramelized onions, I mean, not to Island Vittles. I'll probably go back, it was a nice blog. :)

The idea is to dump approximately a ton of sliced onions into a crockpot, add some butter and olive oil and maybe some thyme and pepper if you're so inclined, and let it go until the onions are soft and brown and perfect.

I ended up needing about 6 hours on high, with a stir break every few hours. The liquid buildup from the sweating onions was significant, so somewhere around the five hour mark, I took off the lid, tipped the crockpot a little, and spooned out some of the juice so I didn't end up with onion soup.

I mixed some of the finished product into some mac and cheese (awesome), and froze the rest for later.

Instinct in a crisis

When faced with people who are grieving, bewildered, or upset, my instincts go straight to food. I must feed these people in their time of need. Maybe it's a learned behavior, but it's so ingrained that it's almost completely automatic. You are crying. I will make you banana bread.

A good friend is going through some very bad things including a terrifying surgery, and some of her family is staying at my house because I couldn't let them all pay for a hotel when I live so close to the hospital and can offer them a comfy bed, free internet and TV, and three purring cats. When I learned that they were coming, I went to the grocery store. Yes, I also cleaned the bathrooms and got the extra blankets out, but the food was so important. Unfortunately, they are the type of people who have no appetite when they're under stress, so I'm at a loss. I'm becoming a pushy European grandmother, offering them food every hour or two, trying to get them to eat. Maybe just a smoothie? Nothing? Well at least let me show you where all the food is in case you change your mind later... and of course if I hear you rustling in the fridge I will come running and assemble that sandwich for you. The words "you need to keep up your strength" actually found their way out of my mouth. I am 30 years old and I have evolved into a bad cliché.

Food is comfort. Food is love. I'm not sure how else to be helpful.

Tomato update

My tomato plants are enormous.

Also, I desperately need to weed that garden and get the Gaillardia staked up, but that will be a task for next weekend.

I wasn't expecting these tomato plants to get so big, and the cages I bought are much too small to properly support and restrain them! They're also much too close together, which means that finding and picking the ripe tomatoes is a bit of an adventure. I've had some stinkbug issues, but they seem to only go after the leaves and the ripe tomatoes, so picking the tomatoes just as they're starting to blush has been working well for me. I go tomato picking with a paintbrush to flick away the stinkbugs, because it still completely freaks me out to touch a bug.

Here's my current tomato supply:

My husband has claimed these particular tomatoes in the name of salsa, which he will make tonight.

I've been counting and weighing my tomato harvest since the very first cherry tomato came off the vine, because I'm a dork like that and I want to see how much money I'm saving by growing my own veggies. I grew these from seeds, not from starter plants, but I suspect that once I factor in the cost of the special seed-starting soil and the little pots, it would have been just as economical to buy little seedlings and start from there. But I did this for the challenge of growing something edible from a seed, and I succeeded and I'm proud of myself.