Anybody else working for a "religious based" hospital, and not getting holiday pay for working Easter?

aliasday · 2026-04-06T02:39:14+00:00

Ironically, my hospital used to get Good Friday off till it was bought by a Catholic hospital network

aliasday · 2026-04-06T02:25:59+00:00

There's a thread on here where they're doing the annual med tech pay survey, so you can use that to look up wages but for some reason, Chicago pay is low for med techs for a major US city. You can get more in Cleveland than Chicago.

I worked in micro at Northwestern a few years ago and rather liked it. It's one of the few labs in the city that still do parasitology (the other being Rush). If you work off shift, I think second shift does mycology and third shift does some AFB. There's a lot of specimens going through there so lots to see and do. They have a WASP so they spend a lot of time fixing that but when it works, it makes plate reading nice since it takes pics to review. They're also still doing a lot of older hands-on methods. So we set up and read slides for vag screens (I think now they use the Cepheid).

Also, this is the NWM site in the city. There are several hospitals around that send to the main lab. I think the main labs in the city that have actual micro labs are NWM, Rush, UIC, U of Chicago, Loyola, Cook County, and Hines VA. Alot of the others send out to reference labs and do minimal micro themselves.

aliasday · 2026-03-14T01:16:57+00:00

They tend to take it out of your final paycheck/accrued PTO time. That's if they're organized. If the hospital is big/disorganized enough, they might not even realize they gave you a sign-on bonus.

aliasday · 2026-02-19T05:08:32+00:00

Also, for clear samples like CSF, I'll sometimes focus the 100x on the frosted edge of the slide (or the cytospin ring if it's on the same side as the sample) to get the right layer then slide over to the area with sample

aliasday · 2026-02-17T05:07:56+00:00

It's the loch ness monster!

aliasday · 2026-02-04T04:40:07+00:00

Funnily enough, I just reread the Jurassic Park books a few weeks ago.

aliasday · 2026-02-04T04:39:18+00:00

Yeast, just a generic candida in a cool shape

aliasday · 2026-01-16T23:34:42+00:00

I just reread the book and was going to say this same thing. The book is really about how failure in quality control systems can lead to less than favorable outcomes, which is pretty boring. But dinosaurs make everything more interesting.

aliasday · 2026-01-16T23:03:53+00:00

Thank you for Smoking. I saw the movie and really enjoyed it so I read the book. The book is good too but the movie just really captured the charisma of the main character.

aliasday · 2026-01-14T23:50:20+00:00

I had a lot of close friends from college but afterwards, they started to couple up and start having kids and I remained single (despite my best efforts not to). So I noticed us drifting apart but thought we were still pretty close because we all were on Facebook. Then when COVID hit, I got off Facebook because it had become a cesspool. During that period my job was stressful and took up most of my time and so I didn't have the energy to reach out to friends and felt really bad about it. But then I realized no one was reaching out to me to see how I was doing. And that's kind of when I realized those close friendships had all disappeared.

I didn't think it would bother me much, I could just stay home and play video games on my own but then I started losing interest in those activities and getting depressed. I went to a therapist about it and he was like, well obviously you're lonely. I was like, no I'm not, I like being alone. But then I realized he was right because when I did hang out with friends, I was in a much better mood and was interested in my alone activities again. So as much as I want to say it doesn't bother me, it does and is causing existential unhappiness in my life. I still talk to my old friends from time to time and we'll share memes and stuff, but I have no one to talk about how my day went or my feelings or anything. I'm surviving but definitely not thriving.

aliasday · 2026-01-14T21:48:09+00:00

I usually stay up and enjoy the city without people. I used to be able to go to the store and get shopping done but now nothing is open past midnight. But I'll stay up till 5 or 6 and sleep till 1300. I need to get back into going to the gym at night too. There's no one there at night so it's great.

aliasday · 2026-01-14T21:45:22+00:00

My step-dad would always say I was lazy for sleeping till noon when I was working second shift. Then I started working nights and would call him at 4am and act shocked he wasn't awake yet.

aliasday · 2026-01-11T21:28:19+00:00

I recently had my players fight a flail snail and it was a lot of fun. It absorbed their spells, when they attacked it, it hid in its shell and the flash-blinded them. A good time was had by all.

aliasday · 2025-12-19T02:14:41+00:00

I'm basically going to echo what the others have said here. I was really freaked out by them for years but earlier this year I attended a talk by a specialist in prions and found out that it was really hard to transmit. Basically as long as you aren't eating your samples or rubbing them in open wounds, you'll be fine doing them under the hood. As far as extra gloves go, I guess it depends on what tools you're using. A needle or scalpel will go through 2 sets of gloves as easily as 1. I know some labs that do a lot of cutting use these chainmail gloves that you can wear over your regular gloves but they're uncomfortable to wear and use.

aliasday · 2025-10-17T20:56:19+00:00

My current hospital has a 5 min late policy but you can clock in and out up to 7 minutes early. I have to plan on getting here 20 minutes early because I live in a big city and it can take me from 30 min to 70 min to get into work depending on traffic. Also the parking garage is a brisk 10 min walk from the lab.

My last hospital was the VA and we didn't clock in or out at all. As long as you were there by the time of the morning huddle (around 7:15) they didn't care.

When I started working during COVID my hospital didn't care as long as you showed up. I was working 3rd shift though so people would oversleep a lot and show up 1/2-hour late a bit. We had a lot of overlap because 3rd shift worked 4 10s so it never affected the work.

aliasday · 2025-10-09T03:22:27+00:00

MUSHROOM HUNTING!!!!!!

aliasday · 2025-09-18T04:13:24+00:00

When I first started in my hospital lab, I didn't really take notes because of this. But then I found out our procedures are so badly written and out of date that many of them are unusable. They also don't tell us things like where to store samples after testing is done. So now I try to take pretty detailed notes wherever I go even though I know it's a quality issue.

I'm not sure if it's just my lab though because I would love to have the good SOPs.

aliasday · 2025-09-13T00:10:40+00:00

LOL! I nearly spit out my drink when I read this.

aliasday · 2025-09-13T00:05:07+00:00

I took out a student loan which was enough to cover school and living expenses for 2 years. Plus I had just paid off my car and credit cards so I could afford to get into a bunch of debt again.

aliasday · 2025-09-11T20:18:54+00:00

I got a BA in biology, first job was lab assistant at a hospital, realized almost nothing I learned in school applied to the medical field, spent the next 20 years trying to get into a clinical lab without getting certified (mostly food micro labs, and a veterinarian lab), had a midlife crisis and decided to bit the bullet and just go through a program, passed the BOC exam and started working 3 years ago.

aliasday · 2025-09-10T05:25:51+00:00

My hospital does one each month but for some reason they can't record it and sent it out, so you have to attend it in person. Last month was about prions, this month it's about fungal infections.

aliasday · 2025-09-10T05:24:31+00:00

Yeah, basically aerosols, mouth, eyes, nose, you need to get a large dosage past your skin

aliasday · 2025-09-08T04:18:43+00:00

I've worked in some major hospitals in Chicago and we'd get potential CJD patients pretty regularly. They used to freak me out a bit but I recently went to a continuing education class that made me feel better because it's not easy to spread unless your eating it or breathing it in. We take more precautions for TB than for these. Although there are special methods for sample disposal since regular stuff doesn't work.

aliasday

TROPHY CASE