Glass in my eye.

There was blood everywhere. Blood in front of me. Blood behind me. Blood to the side of me. Blood all over my hands. It was a typical days work in the hospital lab - "the dungeon" as I like to refer to it. Its in the basement where there are no windows and crazy smells. There's even the occasional tortured scream. The place sometimes seems like a torture chamber.

"Hey man, you wanna do this one real quick before you go to lunch?" I turned in the swivel chair that was too high for me to face my coworker, who was offering a specimen with a smile and said that I surely would, took the specimen from him and turned back to the microscope and within minutes, resumed hunching over. Lots of things in labs are not built for blundering hairy apes over six feet tall such as myself. The predominant gender in this sect of the workforce is that of the female, and the predominant height is a height well under my own.

Extra large latex gloves can sometimes be a challenge to find, along with extra large labcoats, and extra large face masks. Extra large egos, however, can be found effortlessly. Extra large materials for my extra large hook hands to work with would be nice also but this, in terms of the extra tight budget all laboratories tend to be on this is a completely extra unrealistic fantasy. Labs are good at budgeting. I have a theory that this is because labs are full of frugal women who are good at prioritizing and unlikely to take risks. The nursing workforce, on the other hand, makes me wonder how nurses can receive up to $20000 sign on bonuses when healthcare is allegedly undergoing a huge crisis, but I see I digress as usual.

Flashback to me in an undersized swivel chair hunching over a microscope counting blood cells. This time I'm counting what you call reticulocytes. Retics (for short) are immature red blood cells that have been pushed into blood circulation early as a protective measure against some traumatic event, like a severe loss of blood. This particular procedure usually involves manually counting at least 1000 red blood cells under a microscope and determining the percentage of retics present. Yes, it sucks. Usually two glass slides are prepared with patient blood and 1000 cells are counted on each. Afterwards the counts are compared to maintain accuracy.

So, in switching from the first slide to the second slide, I go to secure the slide onto the stage of the microscope using the little metal clasp most microscope stages come equipped with, and my large fingers lose their grip, letting the small clasp fly back into position against the corner of the glass as the glass chips, and (>FLING<) lodges a tiny piece of glass just behind my lower eyelid. 

And that is the story of how I got glass in my eye. And yes, I did get it out with no trouble.