Fire (At) Work

"You are going to cry if you enter" is what my friend told me before we made our way to work that day. That would have been the case usually for reasons as they are in in any other work place. Load, duties, responsibilities and pressures alike.We entered through the emergency exit, our first time that way. The moment we stepped in to the place  we had left the last evening at half past four there was something more than we had expected. A laboratory buzzing twenty four seven with machines, students running around with culture plates and reaction tubes, technicians processing the samples, teachers reporting and flagging off at the reporting desk. Well that was not what we saw. There were unfamiliar faces trying not to step on the cables and broken glass, cleaning up the inch layer of soot on every surface possible and trying to figure out what used to lie in the same place a day ago. Each on of us who worked in this microbiology laboratory until last midnight was confused more than shocked, a fire accident had slopped it all.


Thankfully this was contained at the first floor of our hospital. It wouldn't have been easy for the ten floors above the place with patients, doctors, staff n lives more. For many outside the place, our lab was a small part of the hospital. For patients a left turn up the staircase on the way to the out patient department where they would give sputum, urine, stool, throat swab, skin, nail scraping, drinking water samples and what not "You will get the reports after two days" was the common word. For clinicians more often, a telephone number where they would get the retro viral and hepatitis status before surgery or a blood culture report of patients in the intensive care unit. But for some who built this laboratory from scratch, for those who worked day and night in that one place for years, for those who worked as much as they learnt during their post graduate course in medical microbiology, for those whom this place was beyond its material their whole world was upside down, just in one hour. It surely was under a reductor curse.


Right now our regular diagnosis work is continuing at a basic set up in our medical college building, we started within hours after this mishap. The shifting process in that moment of crisis was not a cake walk. It took us almost two days to decide what would go where and what would work how, we still are in the process of settling down. Hopefully we will get back to our laboratory very soon where the real fun is. A place which always used our time and mind, and made it as colourful as possible. We, especially our professors cannot keep this place in black or at back for a long time. Someone has said " None can destroy iron but it owns rust can, likewise none can destroy a person but his own mindset can" Experience will make you agree. You just need the fire in the right place. This is where we microbiologists find our fire in:

And yeah I did cry.

-R.