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Friday, October 16, 2020

baby's mcv is 20 femtoliters

I'm a lab tech again (in real life, I haven't worked in the lab for five years). I'm the one preparing an emergency transfusion for a baby whose MCV (mean corpuscular volume) is too high; in the dream, the value is 20 femtoliters [bizarrely, that's way too LOW for a newborn; should be between 88-123]. This means the baby's red blood cells can't get through its capillaries.

Suddenly, though, the baby starts to code. The doctors are very busy, but I insist that they tell me what to do with the bag of specially selected blood, or else it will spoil. They yell at me to heat seal off the bag and freeze it for when the baby's stable.

One of the doctors shifts into being my older brother, who is a doctor in real life. He leaves with a resident to discuss the case, and I follow them to the cafeteria. Which oddly is now in the main part of a church sanctuary, instead of in a hospital. They quietly discuss the case at a crowded bar in the cafeteria, but I can hear everything they say and understand the medical terms they use [there were quite a few, and I can't remember now what they were].

I become very slightly lucid and think, Maybe in real life I should go back to working in the lab. There were things that I didn't like about it, but I really loved the science.

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