Skills. Mad Skills.

I totally rocked my cell ID test today. Skin particles, human body, head and pubic hair, animal hair, spermatozoa and epithelial cells. Go me. I identified them all.

And I'd like to point out that I still find it completely amazing that you can spit on a paper towel, let it dry, package it up as evidence, and I'm still able to recover your epithelial cells from it.

At first I was all… what the hell is this? It was a dry paper towel with no apparent evidentiary value whatsoever. Under the stereoscope it looked boring and ordinary. But you could tell that it had at one point been wet in a spot. So, I looked at it under an alternate light source and got zilch. No fluorescence. Totally unremarkable. Unable to figure out anything else I could possibly do, I decided to make a smear of that area of the paper towel on a clean slide… and sure enough… epithelials. He totally spit on a paper towel as part of my competency test.

I was so proud of myself that I figured it out.

I hope that my job always keeps me this fascinated. I know, I know… I have such a simple mind – captivated by spit.

End Blog.