Today I am going to the lab again to have my blood drawn and processed to be sent to Italy. I think we have everything covered. For one, we will be drawing the blood and processing it (extracting the serum, plasma and buffy coat) today and storing everything between -20 to -80 degrees centigrade.
On Monday, around four in the evening, the courier folks will be picking up the samples to ship to Italy. Last time, the problem was with the buffy coat. We needed special tubes to extract this layer. When you centrifuge the blood samples, the blood separates out into three layers - plasma, buffy coat and red blood cells. The buffy coat which forms the middle layer is very less compared to the other two. So, it is difficult to extract. There are special tubes called PCV tubes which are used for this.
Last time, they realized that they needed these tubes well after drawing the blood. This time, we have pre-ordered the tubes and delivered them to the lab already. The lab team is coming on a Saturday especially for me. This will help because there will not be any other patients and they can totally focus on my stuff.
Let's hope everything goes well!
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