by syaffolee
Droppin’ Like Flies
I don’t particularly think of people who go into science as being squeamish. Just go to a couple of seminars given by researchers working on infectious disease. There’s almost always a bit of unholy glee when certain clinical pictures come up.
On Friday morning, a research associate and I were training some students on a protocol for processing bovine blood samples. Non-trivial amounts of blood were involved (and it is a non-trivial exercise getting the blood from an animal that could mow you down in a heartbeat–if it was smart enough), but I didn’t think too much about it because, really, it’s just tubes of red stuff. But before we could even get to step two, three-fourths of the students staggered out of the lab on the verge of fainting (the remaining student was too hyped up on coffee to notice anything). You’d think that they had stumbled onto the movie set of some splatterpunk gorefest rather than some fairly routine laboratory procedure.
I dislike looking at gross stuff as much as the next person, but this, I’m not quite understanding. It’s easy to depersonalize (or in this case, debovinize*) because the blood isn’t gushing out of some living thing–it’s in a tube. Or maybe this is just me–I can think of it in the abstract and treat it as nothing special in the large scheme of things–just another component in the big picture experiment. Other people, it’s more like: Arg! Blood! Cue smelling salts.
*If this isn’t already a word yet, I call dibs!
Don't Shake the Flask 
When I go for a blood test I look away from the needle, but I don’t think it’s because I’m sqeamish. I’m thinking if I’m not looking it’s not going to hurt as much. It always hurts, but I suspect if I was watching it would hurt more. Once the blood is in the tube and I am no longer impaled, I’m fine.
That’s funny. Too bad you didn’t get a vid of it for youtube.Back in high school health class – where they would demonstrate giving blood – we had this guy who would not only pass out, but he would convulse half the time. He did it so regularly that they eventually assigned him a spotter. I don’t know why they didn’t just let him go elsewhere.
I have issues with my own blood, but blood from another creature doesn’t bother me.The thing that always baffles me are the “cricket labs” I teach. I do a couple of labs involving live crickets – one for a mark-and-recapture determination of population size; another examining purported antiherbivore compounds.I always have several students – usually pre-meds – who cannot BEAR to touch the crickets. “They’re gross!” they exclaim.My puzzlement comes because these are people who, the previous semester, dissected a human cadaver in Gross Anatomy. And they’re cringing at CRICKETS? I’d rather EAT a cricket than put my hand in the abdominal cavity of a dead (even embalmed) body. I guess it really is, “to each, his own.”
I am not bothered by getting a needle or blood in a test tube, but maybe the squeamishness has to do with it being the first time? I had to give my dog injections, and although I had to force myself the first time (and I was very scared of making a mistake), after that it wasn’t a big deal. My nephew took anatomy last semester – he said the first day with the cadaver was difficult, but after that – not so much.