Enter the crime scene

 

Our first-year Physiology practical consisted of Hematology (study of blood and related disorders) and Human Physiology (where we learnt the measurements and variations of blood pressure, pulse rate, reflexes etc.) mostly.

Among them hematology, as the name suggests, was a bloody, messy business. A student had to prick his/her own finger and collect blood for doing the practical. Smear preparation was not a big issue as it required a small amount of blood but never shall I forget our bleeding and clotting time practical where we had to draw a substantial amount of blood (enough to fill a capillary tube) TWICE!

Now, one got to see different kinds of students in the physiology lab. Some belonged to the group of people who were courageous enough to prick their fingers but went all light-headed and dizzy (some even fainted) at the sight of the blood.

The second group of people were the over enthusiastic ‘Donors’, that is those who pricked their fingers way too brutally, drew too much blood, and then went around donating the blood to people who were way too scared to draw their own blood! The latter group of people, I would like to call as ‘Receivers’ over here.

The third group were those who pricked others’ fingers for them, that is, ‘The Helpers’. These people were the most priced and yet the most cursed had hated group in the entire class, as the person whose finger they pricked would eventually end up calling them “brutal beasts who have no tenderness in them” and would claim that these people intentionally pricked others’ fingers too hard. Thus, I joined the Donors’ group at times, but never the Helpers’ (I am cursed enough as it is).

Then there were the normal, insignificant people who simply went about the task of blood drawing without much of a fuss and did their practical without being much of a help or problem to anybody. Most of the days, I belonged to this ‘Normal People’ group.

After smear preparation though, setting up the microscope and viewing what we were expected to view was a battle in itself. I shall not go into the technical details over here, but all I can say is, no matter how scary drawing your own blood sounds, the actual difficulty starts after that. 

I remember one hilarious incident where one of our friend’s blood group, on testing in class, turned out to be different from the one she had known all her life. Initially the teacher scolded her thinking that she might have used someone else’s sample. But it turned out later that she had known an incorrect and rare blood group all her life while her original blood group was a very common one. How crazy is that?

With all these practicals going on, and the cleaning episodes being rare, the floor and the tables of the Physiology Lab were almost always stained with a combination of blood and chemical stains, giving them a weird crime scene like appearance in the eyes of anyone who entered for the first time. But as we spent more and more time over there this crime scene became one of our favorite places.