Some of the things my sisters tell me about are so weird. Three are in health care — two nurses & a doctor — and they all say medicine has changed a lot just in a short time. One had a practice out in an affluent part of the state, where she kept getting patients with never-ending rashes she had to figure out. Quite a few of them had seen one doctor after another for it before coming to her. She had to spend a heck of a lot of time peering into microscopes to identify what they had. Apparently doctors tend not to do this because most human skin ailments are recognizable to them; if it is not, they prescribe according to what it PROBABLY is, after a look at the slide. They simply don’t have the time to research it.

She also said she was thinking about writing a paper on the bacteria that are making their way around nail salons. This was a few years ago, and I vowed never to visit one.

Blood Typing: My other sister — nurse — told me that blood typing has gotten much more complicated in recent years. They can’t, apparently, just take a blood sample from someone and say, “Okay, he’s type B-negative, so give him such-and-such type blood.”

People are far more reactive now, she said. Hospitals have to do extensive testing of your blood for factors and sub-factors in it, so if you're getting a transfusion, the donor blood you’re given matches more of the sub-factors in your blood, and you'd be less likely to have antigens to anything in the donor blood. (Having antigens to something the donor blood has developed antibodies to would cause your immune system to attack the donor blood cells.)

Reactions to blood factors used to be very rare.

I hope I’m using the right words — this antigen-antibody thing was confusing.

And there’s something about the blood of women who’ve been pregnant that makes their blood more likely to have antibodies of a certain kind in it, and thus more risky to use in transfusion. The number of pregnancies the woman has had increases the likelihood of her having such antibodies. I heard the Red Cross had to change its practices and try to use more male donors for plasma. Apparently it is still present in the plasma, without the red cells.