It Figures

Filed under: by: Hey Doc Wait

As a lover of forensic shows on TV, I recognized the markings on my white coat as high velocity blood spatter. Not from a gunshot, but from splashing during a central line placement. I cursed a bit when I saw it, because I just cleaned this white coat, and it's kind of a pain in the ass to pull all of the crap out of the pockets (I roll with about 6 lbs of stuff in the pockets), use the bleach pen on all of the ink marks, etc, and get it washed without bleaching the embroidery.


I did this over the weekend, taking a lot of time to bleach all the spots (I'm terrible about ink spots), and I threw the coat into the wash with a couple of towels or somesuch--I'm not even sure what, just something that needed washing.

All went well until today, when I donned my newly cleaned white coat to wear to work. Halfway through the day, I look down, and the lapel is blue. Not white, blue.

I'm too lazy to wash the coat again right now, since technically it's clean, and hey, would you rather see a doctor with a mild blue stain on her coat, or one with bloodstains? Yeah, that's what I thought.

1 comments:

On March 28, 2010 at 11:49 PM , Trent said...

The other day I splattered, on accident I assure you, an internal medicine resident who was standing sheepishly at the foot of the bed during a code while I was starting an a-line. I told him it was "war markings". He didn't think it was funny.