The New Job: Or Why I Haven't Posted Lately

I haven’t posted for a bit. Someone told me February 3. Long time. Well, I got a job after a long period without one. I’m liking it but jobs take up time! But I’m going to try to get back to a regular posting.

I work for my friend Dick in his Ocular Pathology lab at the Vet School on the UW Campus. Our work involves diagnosing the diseases, the pathology, of eyes from animals all over the world. These eyes aren’t working too well, or are painful to the animal, so veterinarians remove them, send them to the lab, where we process them and Dick or his Fellow, Carol, “read out” the cases. That is, they diagnose the disease and report it back to the submitting clinician. The eyes of the world are on us…..or at least, come to us! When the eyeballs come in via US mail, FedEx, UPS, etc, one of my jobs is to “cut in” which means cut the eyeball into pieces which can then be run through the tissue processor and ultimately cut into 5 micron “sections” which are then stained and viewed under the microscope. I like this cutting in process. I always try to determine the disease in the eye from the description before I cut it open. It’s like having a Whitman Sampler of eyeballs. To quote Forrest Gump, “You never know what you’re gonna get”. The eye is an incredible organ. I have a new respect for it. Science often shows me the wonders of the world. The eye is one of those wonders.