Revenge

Well, I wish that I had something of significance to say, or even something that would interest anyone in the least. But honestly, today just won't be your day. So, in light of this, I will relate a little incident that occured to me the other day....

Well, I went down to do some work with some lovely little white lab rats (Wistars to be exact). Nothing bad though, we just wanted to look at them, teach our new PhD student (Anne) how to do a few things like put them to sleep etc. Nothing fancy.

So Anne puts two lovely and well mannered lady rats into the perspex box where in a few moments they will be sleeping soundly and peacefully. So she goes to close the lid.

The two ladies have decided that they were not tired. I should also mention that these rats are about 8-10 weeks old, and therefor still juveniles. And like a juvenile, when they don't want to do something, they cause a fuss.

Soooo, the two lady rats proceed to simultaneously jump out of their cage just before Anne could close the lid, and run in separate directions. One ran towards Anne on the bench, the other away from me. Anne caught hers with little stress.

I wasn't so lucky.

Not this time my boy...not this time...

I tried to grab my rat's tail, missed as it jumped onto a kind of ledge thingy at the back of the bench where it could have jumped to the floor and been even harder to catch. Since I couldn't get at the tail, I had to go for the body. I grasped (not too hard though) the lady rat around her body and carried her to her cage.

This is where the problem arose.

I felt an interesting sensation on my right pinky finger. Like something gnawing on it. Then it hit me. She's gnawing my pinky finger!!!!! One set of teeth (upper or lower?) chomping down on my finger nail, while the other piercing the arteries in the tip of my pinky finger. I couldn't do much about it so I continued to put her in her cage where she remained for a while.

So I washed the wound which was gushing forth blood at a rate of at least approximately 1 litre per minute (I didn't measure it at the time, obviously, but I am a scientist, so not prone to exageration (just spelling errors), so I think I'm right). Anyway though, I washed the wound, tried to stem the tide of blood now filling the room to flood levels, filled out the incident report form because it was the right thing to do, then called Staff Health here at the hospital.

Remembering that I work at a HOSPITAL!!!! And I had a genuine incident where I was bitten by an animal which did draw blood, and that there was a significant potential for infection (bacterial) as the teeth did go deeper than they should have, I would have thought that STAFF HEALTH could have done something. But nope, they told me to go across the road to a private clinic and get it looked at properly because all STAFF HEALTH! could do was put a band-aid on it.

What a friggen joke! I am staff. At a hospital. Yet STAFF health could do nothing.

Anyway though, short story long, I took care of the wound properly to begin with, so the doctor had a look at the bite marks, the scratches and indentations on my finger nail as well as the 32 mm deep hole in the my pinky finger, and prescribed some antibiotics as preventative.

I'll end this story now.