Thursday July 22, 2010 - Slides, more slides, and Indian dinner
Today was booked for a histo path monster session. And it was, sort of. First order of the day - pick up the slides. When the technicians were there. Not first thing. But we managed to meet, and there, spread out over a large counter, were my 175 glass slides. And no slides boxes is sight. Plan A was for me to wrap them individually in paper to transport them to the WARM building to then look at. Not a great plan. Charles the technician and I eventually came to the agreement that slide boxes would be better, that they are available in Uganda, and that there no extra ones in the department for sale. However, we did discover a stash belonging to a faculty member who wouldn’t sell me any but would temporarily lend me two. Done deal. Charles hadn’t finished scraping excess glue off the slides so he gave me one case worth and told me to come back for the rest. At home, multiple tissues are placed in a plastic cassette, and all those tissues appear together on the same glass slide. Here, each individual tissue is hand mounted on a wax block and gets it’s own slide. Hence well under 100 cassettes turns into 175 slides. So I headed back to WARM, alas Joallia (Denis’ office mate, he is in the field) was not in, and did not come in til 11:30, so no access to microscope and no starting the histopath. They don’t have extra keys to the offices, and something like a microscope can’t just be left out, so I hung around in a strategic location to pounce when the office was opened.
By the time I finished case it was time for a break - lunch out in the canteen. Sweet potato and peas do not make a good combination, must remember that. The sweet potato is different from ours - white and firm, not all yellow and mushy. My yellow and green lunch plan was instead white and brown - different peas. Anyway, picked up the rest of the slides and set back to work on case 2, which took until about 5:00. And then the fun began. The case and block number are etched onto the slides with a diamond pencil - and its up to me to sort them out - so I dutifully labelled block 1a, block 1 b, block 2a, etc. It was about then that I noticed that the 175 slides were not completely filed according to case - that after I got through what I thought were the first two cases, and had congratulated myself on being half way done, I realized that the remainder of the slides were a random assortment of the next two cases, and another 4 + 18 from the cases I thought I had already finished. Rats!!! So as I dutifully tried to number to new ones and tuck them into the correct places it occurred to me that there was no way I put 12 tissue sections into one cassette, yet there they were, 12 slides of 1 tissue each all labelled as if they had come from th same cassette. For non-pathologists this may not mean a lot, but basically the lab likely made a mistake and labelled tissues from different cases as if they were from the same one. Or we labelled the cassettes wrong. Fortunately Denis and I kept a detailed list of what we trimmed. Unfortunately, Denis was in the field, not getting his texts, and the list was no where in sight. Time for a stiff drink at this point!
Ella from RESPOND had planned a dinner for tonight, which was just what was needed. After a few final curses for the slides I hopped a boda (past main traffic time and not in the mood for the walk, the taxi, and then another walk) I arrived just in time at a very very nice Indian restaurant just down from the office - the drinks orders were just being taken and that was exactly the order of the moment. There was the main crew from RESPOND, Dominic - an old friend who just arrived in town and is working for them as well, Mike, and Julius (the Rwanda PREDICT guy). Dinner was excellent, we all ate way too much, and we even ordered wine for the table. It came in red or white, with a general type listed (merlot, cabernet, etc) but not much other detail. It’s so nice to be able to have a fancy dining room open on the sides to the surrounding gardens - the benefits of consistent warm weather. Julius’ brother came to pick him up at about 10 and I headed off as well - never turning down a lift is a good motto! Turns out drinking red wine in Uganda is not a good plan - I woke up in the middle of the night with the most splitting headache - I’m sticking with beer from now on!
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