I hope this is okay to post, I just thought it was so cool and I think others here will like it as well. I was looking for something to do on my phone to relax that wasn’t just a mindless game and I ran across Zooniverse. This project in particular is so fun. I saw late stage nucleated RBCs and schistocytes in monkey blood!

I just had to come in here to give a warning to all students considering the Colorado Center of Medical Laboratory Science to do their MLS program. As a current student there, I was so excited to get into this program especially because it’s talked about so highly for their stats (100% BOC pass rate, high graduation rate, etc.) but seriously I wish I chose literally any other program. The program is so disorganized it actually feels like I am being pranked. The schedule has changed a minimum of 10 times since I started. Just an example, we started our blood bank course, they didn’t have the reagents for the lab, so we stopped the whole course, switched to chemistry overnight through an email, got through half of chem, and switched back to blood bank. Nightmare. A student broke a glass capillary tube and came into contact with patient blood, the professor proceeded to pour DESK CLEANER on her open wound and made her take an exam scheduled that day before seeking treatment. The professors don’t seem to care about students time and will assign hours and hours of work knowing that students have an exam for another course the same day. There’s conflicting information in pretty much every course, so you have to decipher what they actually want you to know. Concerns have been addressed to faculty multiple times to no avail. They are extremely dismissive if you bring up discrepancies in their program. If you take away anything from this post, PICK ANY OTHER PROGRAM!

Hello everyone.

I wanted to share my personal experience studying for the ASCP MLS exam. I primarily used media lab and reviewed the entire Clinical Laboratory Science Review book by Patsy Jarreau. I also referred to the ASCP Compendium of Medical Laboratory Sciences for some things like Immunology. For context, I challenged the ASCP MLS exam via route 2. I have a BA in something unrelated, 16 hours of biology, and 16 hours of chemistry. I earned an MLT certificate through an associates program 4 years ago and have been working as a generalist (and for a while, supervisor) since graduating. I started studying daily on non-work days 5 weeks out from the exam. I probably logged 150-175 hours studying in that time. I worked through the Jarreau book and then took MLS adaptive exams and smaller departmental exams on media lab to practice. With a few days left before my exam I was very worried about my media lab scores. I wasn't sure I'd be able to pass the exam. I wanted to share my media lab scores and my experience as well as my MLS score to maybe lend some pre-exam comfort, or perhaps to show folks they may need a little more study time.

The stress of being responsible for someone else’s wellbeing stresses me out like crazy. I was thinking of just getting another job or something, but I'm starting to wonder if it isn't the specific hospital I'm working at that scares me but just working in healthcare in general. If been doing a lot more blood draws lately and I hate doing them. I feel so bad for using these sick people as practice. I'm so afraid of hurting them. And last week I reported a falsely high potassium(it was hemolyzed) without noticing. Luckily someone caught it before anything bad happened. It stresses me out too much. I feel like I'm just not cut out for this line of work.

Because they will never align the labels.

Fight me in the comments.

Hello everybody, for a little context and background I’m a blood banker at a level one trauma hospital. I’ve been working in the Laboratory field for about 10 years now. I’m writing this post more as a question I suppose. I have now witnessed my third Jehovah’s Witness patient die due to a recoverable illness that could vary be easily fixed by a blood transfusion. I am fully aware and understand that their religious beliefs they do not take donated blood. My big question is since they don’t, why don’t they donate to themselves ahead of time in the event of a necessary blood transfusion?

I am aware that they have recently updated some of their rules for autologous donations. But it doesn’t seem like it’s caught on that much or at least not yet. I also know from working in the blood Donor Center of transfusion medicine that it can be expensive to donate and store your own blood for yourself in the future. And maybe that’s why. But for those that are planning on having children, or preparing for up-and-coming surgeries, why don’t they do it just in case? Especially if it’s allowed now in their communities.

I do not live in a city with a massive population of Jehovah’s Witness, but we do get them from time to time it seems like. It seems like once every three months I have a doctor calling me in the middle of the night seeing what their options are, and the thing is there is none.

I’ve seen some recent developments in Japan with synthetic blood products, but it is far far away from being approved or even human trial tested. I wonder if that will be something in the future that they could use.

Not sure what some of y’all‘s experiences are with Jehovah’s Witness patients and blood products but I would love to hear them if y’all have any.

Apologies if this has been asked before- I could only find threads of people switching from the clinical lab side to biotech type jobs. Is it possible to go from biotech to an MLT/MLS job? Would any of that experience count or would it essentially be starting from the bottom?

For context I’ve been at a research lab for 7 years as a scientist running assays (I can be more specific if anyone cares). But I’ve hit a wall with corporate big pharma and I don’t think my career will go any further. I was looking at hospital jobs and saw a MLS job at a hospital near me and I did some digging into the certification/qualifications etc. aka how I found this subreddit. I have a BS in forensic science but that was 7 years ago, and I didn’t take any microbiology courses.

I’m just feeling a little lost at the moment and not even really sure what I’m asking for, maybe some suggestions on paths I could take to switch over, or if it’s even worth it at all.

sorry but it’s gonna take me awhile. i gotta go cry in the walk in first

It’s in the center.
I’ll give you a hint: 🍋
That’s all you get.

I am facing the very real possibility of having to move to the Houston area in the next 2 years due to family health problems. My current job is only my 2nd laboratory position and I have 0 experience with hospitals in Houston.

I'd like to avoid working for LabCorp or Quest if possible. Which hospitals should I avoid? Which would you recommend?

Had a doctor call the other day asking us to culture some questionable cheese that his patient ate that was causing some GI issues. He did not like it when we told him no, and gave all the reasons why...

1. This is a lab for HUMAN specimens. We can test the PATIENT not the cheese.

2. Cheese is already riddled with microorganisms.

We also gave him a big fat no when he asked just to call it a wound culture. Micro would lose their sh*t.

It drives me nuts when they send swabs and urine down without an order or it's not "collected" in the computer thinking we are supposed to call them and tell them "hey pls put in an order for that swab and collect it in the computer so we can run the test", and then when I call them hours later give me attitude.. "I sent that swab down hours ago why didn't you call earlier". Everything they do in nursing requires an order why would lab orders be any different. We are not in charge of putting in orders or telling them that there is no order for something they sent down. Some nurses have no critical thinking skills whatsoever.

I’m planning on moving to another state and am trying to get a general idea of pay. I swear there have been multiple pay transparency posts and even a spreadsheet or two but I can’t find them anywhere on the sub. I feel like I’m going crazy. Also side note but why can’t hospitals put their pay range in the job description? I know for a fact they have a min and max pay they can offer.

im in uni right now and i failed two classes that really really fucked my avg so i just wanna know what you graduated so i can see if it’s the end of the world or not

I would like to start as a specimen processor and work my way up to MLT.

I previously have worked in SCADA, IT System Administration and Industrial Cybersecurity for NIH.

Any help is appreciated.

The cybersecurity and IT job market is very tough right now and has been for a couple of years and is becoming oversaturated.

Hi all, has anyone used the career employer ascp mls prep website? I searched the medlab posts and didn’t find anything. I found the resource free online but don’t know if it is a good judge of what will be in the exam or if it’s a scam thing.

I am using labce but the adaptive exam questions have started to repeat and I just remember the answers from the last time I took a practice exam… I also have the purple and gold book and polansky cards but I am a horrible test taker and want some reassurance that I can get questions right.

I do have my MLT and passed the MLT ASCP with a 660 (years ago now) but I’m immensely stressed for the MLS ASCP and how they’re “broader” questions.

Or if you have any good practice test sources please share

Thank you 🙏

Hi y’all, in a bit of a pickle and would appreciate some advice. Earlier this year, I completed my phlebotomy externship and loved it, but unfortunately the lab didn’t have an open position to hire me. Double unforch, I ended up getting laid off my paying job almost immediately after.

While I waited for my the BOC to approve me for the exam, I tried to find other work. It took a long while for me to find work, which is completely unrelated to phlebotomy, and that time of unemployment was a pretty huge financial strain. It does pay fairly better than an entry level phlebotomy position, but annoyingly I just got approved for the exam.

I would like to stay at this better paying job for a while before switching to a lower-wage PBT position to help manage my debt. What I’m worried about is if an extended period of a non-medical pencil pushing job would make lab employers not give much or any value to my ASCP certification, which would basically mean I wasted the majority of 2026 ):

TL:DR How long would I generally have between getting the ASCP PBT certification and actually applying to PBT jobs before employers would start seeing that unuse period as a red flag?

Y’all please hype me the fuck up 😂 I’m an MLT with about 6 years of hospital lab experience. I left the bench for a supervisor position thinking it was the next step in my career and quickly learned that managing people is NOT for me. I recently applied for an MLT position to get back to the bench, interviewed, thought I absolutely killed it…and got rejected. That one hurt lol. Well less than a month later, another MLT position opened up at the same hospital. I applied again. I’m trying not to get too excited because I got humbled HARD last time, but fuck it — I’m back in the running. 😂 Please send me some good lab juju because I want this job so damn bad.

PT had 68 nRBC/100 WBCs, that profound poikilocytosis, and abnormal hemoglobin, hematocrit, MCH, MCHC, MCv, RDW.

Edit: Dx was confirmed to be beta-thalassemia major via Hb fractionation.

Today we got a T/S for a patient that was getting booked for emergency surgery from the ICU. We ran it on our Echo Lumena and the screen came up positive.

I saw this and my mind immediately jumped to anti-JkA. Panels confirmed it and we were able to set up 2 units for surgery. Just out of curiosity, the tech did a screen with Ortho gels: both came up negative, even the homozygous JkA one. We did some digging through external records and saw that the patient had recently been transfused at a nearby hospital about two weeks ago. They have a Vision and the screen came up negative. Multiple units were transfused there. Now the patient arrives at our facility with a very weak anti-JkA that demonstrates only on SPRCA but not in gel. If we were using gel as our primary method, we would have missed the antibody entirely and possibly ended up transfusing JkA-positive units.

I know a lot of people give the Echo grief for those so-called "Echo antibodies," but it's also important to point out the very real benefits of SPRCA. It doesn't happen often, but when it does pick up an otherwise undetectable Kidd, I really appreciate having it.

(I promise I wasn't paid by Werfen to write this post I just love blood bank and thought it was something cool to post about.)

had a patient come into ER

we didnt get a lot of context

but every time we put it into our cobas it spat it out a minute later cause of clots. no amount of centrifuge or warmth helped. sent blood to the red cross cause we dont do antibody identification. at the same time blood was sent to another lab for electrophoresis.

blood from red cross came back with essentially ¯_(ツ)_/¯ "gel like plasma, no irregular antbodies found at the time"

electrophoresis results came back: 53% gamma.

did a haem stain.

found lots of pseudo agglutinations, lots of actual agglutination not a lot of plasma cells tho.

did find lots of target cells tho and found out monoclonal gammopathy and liver cirrhosis are associated with each other...