Don't read if you're squeamish.....

I am mad at myself for not making the effort to blip something yesterday, but I started with a headache in the afternoon and by the time I arrived home I felt dreadful. Oh well, it isn't the end of the world!

I felt a bit better this morning, thank goodness, as it has been a training day at the NHSBT Centre in Liverpool. I was booked on the tissue bank tour, which was so interesting. We donned our white coats and went into the mortuary and labs. It is amazing what they do there. There are only about a dozen or so people who cover the whole country and go out and harvest organs and tissues. Everyone talks about organ donation, but someone sadly has to die in a specific way for an organ to even be considered and they don't realise that tissue donation can be done on anyone. I didn't realise what was involved. 

The woman who did the tour is one of a team of two in the North West who go out to take tissues. Eyes take minutes, leg bones about half an hour and a whole body tissue retrieval can take about eight hours. I bombarded her with questions, it really was fascinating. I persuaded her to open the body fridges...they were empty. You see these on television programmes but the hard, cold shelf that opens in real life before you makes your skin tingle. I did ask if they really did tie a brown label on a toe (I just couldn't help myself)....they don't, they put a wrist band on. 

There were people washing bone. It had been ground to a powder before washing, then it is washed about eight times. This bone can be used for people who have had replacements and there is wear and tear on the implant, instead of replacing again they can pack the bone in. It is rehydrated and then used in a joint. There were packets of bone in different states....some surgeons use the fine powder, some prefer course, some bone chips and there were even little cubes. 

Anyway, it was absolutely fascinating. We did a lot of peering through windows as we couldn't enter the labs, but it was good. And......I didn't have to sit through a manual handling course again lol. Oh yes....and I was home just after five...hurrah!.