When the Homily is about Immunology

Itching Noses
or
Sayings from a Laboratory father?

There are times, actually probably many times, when I am suddenly struck by some profound spiritual lesson while in the midst of seemingly mundane tasks.

I am seated semi-comfortably at the Bio-Saftey Cabinet listening to the soundtrack of Master and Commander piped into my ears via a broken MP3 player securely and safely stored under my lab gown. In my gloved left hand I hold an opened 10ml tube of blood ridden with Hep B virus (and that being the case one can statistically assume it contains numerous other fun stuff as well), while in my right hand I hold a simple transfer pipette which is busily being worked to mix the blood in the aforementioned tube.

The itch began on the lower left side of my nose and began to work its way up toward my eye - almost as if some vile insect were upon me! As that nasty little thought filled my head, my desire to drop all I was doing and enter into a face scratching "freak out" dance fest right there in the clean room was overwhelming. But the process of filling my need to scratch the itch would have required me to very gently and carefully put the opened tube of blood back in it's rack, dispose of the pipette, step away from the hood, remove my gloves and dispose of them, remove my face shield and then hope that I had not contaminated any of my other samples and controls while I seek some semblance of a fingernail to scrape my irritated skin.

A lengthy and potentially dangerous process, one that I managed to resist. And so, while enduring the itch, I finished the well known and personally coreographed proceedure, disposed of the blood tube, capped its new recepticle and then pushed away safely to fill the need I had. And to my suprise, the itch was gone.

Sometimes if we resist the temptation for just a single moment longer than we thought possible, it will leave us entirely.