Blood

This could've been better:

Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/5oJ5W . In which i fail to take a blood sample because i'm a wuss, but salvage the video anyway, i hope. If you want to take a blood film, you need a drop of dilute citric acid in salt solution, two microscope slides and some blood. Take a drop of blood and place it in the drop of solution, which is anticoagulant because it mops up calcium ions, on the slide, then scrape the edge of the other slide across and place a coverslip on top. It should then be possible to observe it under a microscope.

There are three main types of cells in blood: red blood corpuscles or erythrocytes, white blood cells or leucocytes, and platelets. Red blood corpuscles carry oxygen and carbon dioxide and either take it up or give it up, and are not actually cells - their insides do not contain the likes of nuclei. White blood corpuscles defend the body against perceived threats. Platelets are partly responsible for blood clotting and are fragments of cells called megacaryocytes.

This video didn't go according to plan, but i'm trying to salvage something from it.

I was of course looking for Barr bodies.  Later on, i finally managed to get a sample and may have found them.  This brings up a different issue than the actual question of the bodies themselves, which is:  how do you know when you're seeing patterns where there are none?  However, since this is piling uncertainty on top of uncertainty, i'm just going to decide that they're there, because i saw small things sticking out of much larger irregular nuclei, but not all of them, and i could go on vacillating about whether that's what they were or not, but for the sake of my sanity i'm just going to jump to an opinion and say i saw them.


So, i finally told Sarada.  I won't say more than that except that it went well.  It also means i can now start talking to other people about it and won't get caught in the same kind of awkward situations i have been, but in whole new awkward situations, which will at least make a change.