Folks, your response has been great.  So far, I’ve sent out 50 Muscle and Nerve packets around the states and 14 to countries around the world.

I can’t help but wonder if these procedures will be ‘an interesting’ bunch of pages in the clutter of other such pages gathering dust in a heap of papers,  or are some of these improvements getting on the line with histotechs doing them in their muscle and nerve biopsies?

I’m not the pop quiz type----I’m the grandpop quiz kind----excuse me---this keyboard did it.

I will just leave this little cluster of words hanging----

For so many years chasing after ways to find possibly life-saving information from nerve and muscle tissues, it became a stern rule that any---that is ANY---improvement in the effectiveness of the search would be adopted without regard for the comfort of old habits,     the relative difficulty of the improved me, or the time it took to complete and adopt the improved procedures, although I would, of course, work to ‘get going’ with new, improved procedures.

This became, please, pardon the purple prose,  a MORAL IMPERATIVE.  Processing a biopsy is not a histotech doing his or her thing----it’s a histotech doing everything to the nth degree with the biopsy tissues for the good of the patient. 

“Some people do it that way, some people do it this way---ho hum”  No.  We ALL go ALL the way ALL THE TIME searching though those bits of people.

Gad---an aria popped out----but that’s it, I think----I’ve never seen a  histotech  become the darling of the paparazzi   ---We wrestle in a lab with those tricky tissues to make them yield their secrets—BUT when the neuropathologist said to me, “We never would have found this condition if you hadn’t done those procedures”, that line from Gilbert and Sullivan played in my head: ”I wouldn’t trade places with Admiral Nelson hisself, no matter who he was a-huggin’ of at the moment.”.   .         

No I realize I have sent packets out.  That’s it. What happens now is up to all you histotechs out there. However, I wouldn’t mind at all if an occasional word, now and then, would show up on the histonet or on my e-mail about any of those procedures from the packet being adopted in your labs.         

I have more packets----they are waiting breathlessly to go out to into the world.

 georgecole@ev1.net