Strength in Numbers- Wk 4 of Brigits Flame
Callie pressed the button on the centrifuge, watching the vials spin faster and faster until it stopped with a rude BLEEP. For those few moments she couldn’t hear the moans and cries from the hospital rooms next to the lab. She took one of the vials out, held it up to the light. The plasma glowed yellow as eggwhite, while the purplish blood cells congregated sullenly at the bottom.
What are the chances, she thought, pouring the plasma off, that this blood is healthy? One in five? Well that’s a subjective probability, and what I’m after is a strong confidence interval. She made some notes, loaded another round of vials.
Finally, trying to still the trembling of her hands, she tied a length of rubber tubing around her arm above the elbow, loaded a syringe onto a rubber-topped vial, pumped her fist and slid the needle into the vein now jutting out of her arm. She watched the vial fill at an unseemly rate, and it felt hot when she slid the needle out and set it on the workbench.
She loaded her blood, marked with an initial, into the centrifuge with the last batch of vials and turned them on. She held a cotton ball over the tiny wound in her wrist as she watched them whirl. I wonder if it makes a difference that the blood is hot. I hope not. She smiled to herself at the irony of it. Hope isn't statistically supported.
She set up the slides, labeling each one to correspond with a vial and droppering the blood cells carefully. She covered each bloom of peony with a hair-thin glass slip, her movements calm.
She set the slides for a fateful moment under the searing white eye of her microscope. Healthy blood she set in one area; infected in another. She did not look at the initials she had written in little square writing; slide after meticulous slide she simply sorted. The infected slides were roughly five to every healthy one.
Finally she sat back up, rolled her shoulders, switched off the microscope. Looked through the sorted slides to find her own initial; sagged when she saw it. It was in the healthy group.
Statistically improbable, a highly unlikely binomial distribution… Maybe I’ll live to find a cure. For the second time that day, Callie smiled. Maybe I’ll beat the odds. Someone has to be lucky.