Asklemmy

Happy ending story, but it's still gross.

I do workplace safety and hazardous material handling (instructions, plans, regulation, etc), for all sorts of facilities, from dirty ground to lab waste.

Hospitals have a number of types of dangerous waste, among them stuff that get disinfected in bags in an autoclave (oven) and stuff that shouldn't be in a bag, like needles, scalpel blades etc.

I was giving some on-site instructions, which included how to dispose of things. So I tell the people to never assume someone does everything right, because we've all thrown trash in the wrong bag at some point, and you don't want to find out someone left a scalpel in the autoclave bag by jamming it into the hole and pulling a needle from your hand.

My eye drifts slightly left, to one of my students current assisting another worker doing literally that, stuffing a second bag into the autoclave and then shouting "OW, fuck", before dripping blood on the ground.

Now, nobody knows what's in the bag. Some moron threw sharps in with the bio waste, who knows where it's from. For all I know, they just caught zombie-ebola, and it's my fault for talking slightly too slow.

Thankfully, after some antibiotic and fervent prayer, everything turned out to be OK.