Profile

I live in Basingstoke with my boyfriend and massive black cat called Pickles.

I used to figure skate when I was younger, but now I powerlift! Sequins vs heavy weights, definitely a difference!

I love coffee, pizza, chocolate, and Disney films. My favourite character is Stitch

I work in Haematology and Blood Transfusion in a hospital laboratory.

Haematology is the study of your actual blood – your red cells that carry oxygen, your white cells that help fight infection, and your platelets that help stop bleeding. In my work I check to make sure everything is behaving as it should, and keep an eye out for any problems and try and work out what they are and why they’ve happened.

My work involves looking after all the analysers that give me the results (when they stop working they beep VERY loudly) and looking down a microscope at actual blood to see what’s going on.

You could say I’m a Vampire Detective!

Blood Transfusion is where we test to see what blood group you are and maybe give you someone else’s blood to help you feel better. We have to be super careful with this testing and make sure we’re certain that the blood we’re giving you is the right sort as it can go very wrong otherwise.

I work different hours as the laboratory is always open. I work during the day, in the evening, overnight, at the weekend, I’ve even worked on Christmas Day!

Depending on what job needs doing that day I could be looking after my analysers, making sure they have all the reagents (posh science word for ingredients) they need to run each test, and putting all the tubes of blood from the patients on them to run the tests.

I could be checking all the results the analysers make, and then deciding if they make sense. Sometimes we need to phone doctors or have a look at the blood under the microscope, so I might be making those decisions too.

Some days I am the person at the microscope looking at lots of people blood. We could be looking for why they have lots of white cells (these go up if you have an infection, but also could be a nasty cancer), or why there aren’t many platelets (because we’d quite like your body to be able to stop the bleeding if you fall over in the playground and cut your knee). Sometimes I can’t answer these questions so I will give that microscope slide to a Haematology doctor for them to have a look and see what they think.

Some days I might be in Blood Transfusion testing peoples blood to find out what blood group they are, and then making sure I pick the right product to give to them.

And sometimes I spend and afternoon rummaging in my toolkit trying to fix an analyser!