44 Comments Posted by Seventh

Oh wow - we have bottles exactly like that from the same company still on the shelves inthe older wings of the labs at work!
We all know they're out of date so they're never touched but the labs are barely ever used and we don't need the storage space so they've just been left there.
Now I wonder just how old they really are!

ahhh - beautiful shot!

And i love that you titled it "Helix" it's one of my irrational pet-hates that peopel call these things 'spiral staircases'. they're NOT spirals! they're HELICES!

imagine a piece of wire being wrapped around a cylinder. you've just made a helix. the width of it remains the same all the way along.
now wrap the wire around a CONE. that's a spiral, the width gets smaller towards one end.

As these staircases have a constant width all the way down, they're helices, not spirals. i have no idea why this irritates me so much, it's such a small, insignificant thing!

I just want to point out that just because there ARE two tubs in that room, doesn't mean that it was standard practice to use both at the same time. It just means that they COULD use both if they had to get a lot of people clean fast.

I mean... most public toilets have a whole bunch of cubicles, but you rarely see ALL of them being occupied at the same time - it just meanas that the buiding CAN cope with more people when it has to.

But... it's on the inside of the door...
[look at the previous photo - taken from inside the room]

surely you would want it on the outside to read when you open the door? Or better yet, on BOTH sides of the door!

The extended baseboard behind the chair makes me wonder if maybe oxygen canisters could have been placed there, presumably with the tubes going over the back of the chair?

wow - at work i quite regularly have to put my hands in water baths set to 60 degrees C. I can now tell work that they're officially 'scalding' me - and it's not just me being wimpy!

Henry - I don't know if you still check here but i was wondering how tight the collar would get? Because it'd have to be fairly tight to make an air seal, but not so tight as to close the airways of the patient. Would it be uncomfortable? And if a seal was not properly made, would there be air rushing down your neck? My apologies if the questions are annoying or intrusive.
Carrie

Yes, but there might be confusion about whether the one UNDER 21 is 22 or if it's the one ABOVE that is 22.

it might seem trivial and dumb, but for the sake of adding a few more numbers to the door it's worth it to avoid doing the wrong procedure on the wrong body. it's not like the body can correct a doctor who mixes them up like a live patient can [most of the time]

besides, maybe they got a linear pack of numbers - which would be useless if every third number was removed so they just put them all on the doors.

Oh yeah, once the five or twenty years are up they're all incinerated - I mean that I wonder what happens to the samples that still have to be stored for years, when their storage place is abandoned?

hehe - they haven't changed much. nowadays they're plastic, and have printed labels with barcodes, but yeah - still the same thing.

this would be for small tissue samples, like for example if someone died of a suspected heart attack, they'd send sections of the blood vessels of the heart to the pathologist to be examined macro and microscopically to confirm cause of death.

These bottles are for pieces about the size of the tip of your finger, about 1cm cubed. they go right up to massive tubs for entire organs - those are creepy.

and, as a vaguely-related side-note: all histological and pathological samples taken by hopsitals in the UK must be kept for five years. the microscope slides made from those samples must be kept for 20 years. The storage rooms are huge - and phenomenally morbid - i wonder what they do with all the samples when the hospital shuts down? presumably move them to another hopsital - they legally cannot throw them away.

Yeah, that's a slops sink. a sink with a flush as well as taps.

and yeah, the high cistern is fairly typical of old British plumbing. the tiolets at my school had cisterns all the way up there. i guess it provides more gravity and more force to the water.

you don't wear your everyday white labcoat when dealing with unknowns and potentially infectious stuff [such as dead bodies] because you don't want to get splashed with something nasty in the morgue and then walk out into the general hospital and spread it around.

often they wear blue or green coats - a bit like surgeons - in the morgue and they'll be thoroughly washed after use - at work we're not allowed to take out labcoats from the site, they have to be washed onsite, so nothing gets taken out or brought in on them

hmmmn.. in modern hospitals you quite often find that out of hours in the A&E the toilets are locked except for the ones closest to the waiting area. I once asked and got a whole load of reasons from "to give the junkies fewer places to hide" to "so the nightstaff have fewer places to keep an eye one" and things like that.

so maybe this toilet was locked at night or our of hours for whatever reason, and the huge deadbolt was put on as a visual indicator that the room's out of use [to prevent somone waiting patiently for hours for the non-existant occupant to finish!]

yep, looks like an old evaporating unit. We use something vaugely similar in the lab i work at.

the coils heat up the flask and the liquid boils. you have one entry to insert the liquid, and a smaller entry that you can use to let out the steam. possibly the arms make it so tha tyou can rotate the flask/heating coils so they're not concentrating on just one part of the bottle.

maybe to purify liquids - we use them to boil down a tincture into a syrup. you can be amazingly accurate with how thick you make the mixture.