20 May 2019 (Monday) - BTLP-TACT excercise

 

I thought I’d best do a BTLP-TACT exercise today. If I don’t do one a fortnight I get little reminders from the boss. And for all that I might grumble, I quite like having the emergency simulator to hand.

 

I was presented with two cases.

41749 was an eighty year old woman requiring group and save for a fem-pop bypass.

94647  was a thirty year old chap in acute renal failure for a group and save

 

 

41749 was blood group AB Neg with weakly positive antibody screen in cells one and two.

I ordered antibody panels. The IAT and enzyme panels were positive in cells one, two and three. This corresponded with anti-D but anti-Cw could not be ruled out.

 

94647 was blood group A Pos with positive antibody screen in cell two.

I ordered antibody panels. The IAT panel was positive in cells two, three, five and six which didn’t actually correspond with anything, but anti-K and anti-E could not be ruled out. In fact it could have been anti-E and anti-K.

The enzyme panel gave the same result, but weaker reactions in cells two and six (anti-K) and stronger reactions in cells three and five (anti-E)

I decided to go for anti-E and anti-K.

The option to have performed a phenotype would have been useful here.

 

I got it right…

16 May 2019 (Thursday) - Oncologist Newsletter

The Oncologist newsletter arrived in my in-box today. As always it I really more of peripheral interest, but interesting nonetheless.

There was a particularly interesting bit about the pathophysiology of the cancerous cells in Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I followed most of it… which is probably about the best I could hope for bearing in mind how technical the article was.

14 May 2019 (Tuesday) - NBCA Newsletter

The National Blood Clot Alliance sent their monthly update today. It was of peripheral interest (at best).

I’ve been discussing CPD with colleagues recently. For some reason I seem to be viewed as something of an expert on the subject. I’m not – I’ve just subscribed to pretty much every e-journal and mailing list and Facebook group I can find in the desperate hope that I might learn the odd thing or two. It’s no secret that much of what I come up with is of no relevance whatsoever. I think it’s probably fair to say that for every individual thing I find that warrants mention in this blog, there’s half a dozen that go straight in the bin.

I think that I might unsubscribe from the updates from the National Blood Clot Alliance. No disrespect intended to them, but I am *not* their target audience.

14 May 2019 (Tuesday) - IBMS Newsletter

The IBMS sent their newsletter today. You can read it by clicking here. There was a load of stuff… it was all rather interesting, but a lot of it was about what specific people were doing and about biomedical science day…

I used to get involved with that. Am I too old to do so now? Looking at all the publicity material it seems to be something for the “hip young things”. I *really* feel I could do so much more than just bide my time until retirement…