Adventures in Compounding (and other things)

Today was another one of the compounding Saturdays of doom. I went into work (running on very few hours of sleep, thanks to the inane urge to watch Watchmen at midnight last night) and was presented with twelve IVs, 50 syringes to put 0.1 mL of a drug into, and a stack of things that needed to be made. I spent two hours in the hood -which is pleasant enough at first, but soon it becomes a sweltering nightmare in which you're focusing so hard on tiny details that you start to forget big picture things. Like the fact that I still have one more exam coming up, or that you should probably remove surgical booties when out of the hood so you don't walk around looking like an escaped mental patient the rest of the day.

It wouldn't have been such a bad day except that we finally got the H1N1 vaccine in and another shipment of the seasonal flu vaccine. The other intern essentially had to spend the entire day in the blood draw room sticking needles in people while I ran back and forth from the compounding room to help the pharmacist out during rushes, usually whilst covered in whatever cream I'd just spilled. An observation of note: wearing a surgical mask, even if it's just to prevent yourself from breathing in hormone dust, freaks patients out. Moreso when you burst flailing from the room and trip over the rug while trying to wipe a concoction of testosterone off your arm before it absorbs enough to cause some rather unpleasant changes.

I ended up making something like 600 mL of a stock cream and filled well over fifty syringes with the stuff. The true trial of the day, though, came in the form of a thyroid capsule that for some unfathomable reason contains olive oil. I have no idea why anyone would put olive oil in a gelatin capsule, but I valiantly attempted it with the assurances of the lead compounding tech that she'd done it before and it works pretty well.

I don't know to which dark gods she has been sacrificing sheep to be able to make that work, because I spent two hours trying to coax the oil/pig thyroid/silica gel mess into those capsules. It smelled terribly, looked like death, and refused to cooperate. I gave up when the syringe I was using exploded the vile mixture all over the window and wall, and vowed to steal the dark secrets from her on Monday.





Also, I recently gave in to a two-year wish and bought myself a squishable. It's amazing. That's him above. I dubbed it Worthington and promptly spent the afternoon taking pictures of him attacking various things and being quite the intellectual. The afternoon would probably have been better spent studying for the dosage form and design final I had Friday, but everybody needs a break, right? And that particular final turned out to be ridiculously easy.



The aforementioned projects are still in the works - one of them involves setting up a program that would allow a group of people to see what their friends are reading and connect to other people who read the same things. I can't do it by myself, so the ever-awesome Cody will hopefully be helping me iron it out when we both have some actual time. I got the idea from him, as he has been talking about keeping track of everything he reads, and I think it'd be a neat way to connect with your friends and with other people.

There may be another post up tomorrow. I, in a lapse of judgment, agreed to let the techs take me out to the bars tonight for a few hours. If some other less-than-suave "gentleman" tries to shove his hand in my drink his time, he's going down.