My private desk is at one end of my office suite and our blood test lab is at the other end. So it would take a pretty loud noise to travel the distance. This morning, my door was open and I heard a distant happy group-scream coming from that direction. My office manager, whose desk is near mine, shouted back to the screamers. "Who’s pregnant?"
This is a common ritual in our office. Patients come in and get their blood drawn to see if their fertility treatment resulted in pregnancy or not. The tests take a half hour to run, and as the results are coming off the machine, there is the familiar clicking of the internal printer, sounding a lot like the dot-matrix printers of old. If you don’t remember the 1980′s, you probably don’t know what that is. Some days, my staff members run back there upon hearing the noise, wanting to be the first to see the results roll off the printer, especially if the test is for a favorite patient of theirs. If a scream follows, it means somebody is pregnant. If there is silence, then the results are negative.
This machine has served us well for nearly a decade. It has always delivered accurate results and we have always passed the government-mandated quality control testing. However, as with anything, time marches on as technology advances. Next week, we will retire Old Betsy and replace her with a new state-of-the-art analyzer. The good thing is that the new machine is faster, more automated (requiring less labor to prepare and load the trays), can be run without batching tests and will ultimately be more cost-efficient to operate. The results are supposed to be even more accurate, but there’s not much room for improvement over Old Betsy in that department. As excited as we are about the new silent-running machine, we will certainly miss that familiar sound that has heralded the good news for nearly 400 babies.
