The Urine Experiment

Ok.  I'll explain.  Yesterday during morning coffee break one of the surgeons on board asked me about doing an experiment involving boiling urine.  By afternoon coffee break (yes, we take two a day) Sarah the Lab Tech and I  were sold on the idea and ran around trying to get all the things we'd need.  My supervisor decided to take the morning off so she wouldn't be involved in what was going to happen.  Claudia is by far the best supervisor to have around!  Sarah and I decided to start at 8am so as not to interfere with the rest of our work, and had the beaker, hotplate, thermometer, eye goggles, and face masks (just in case it smelled) ready to go right on time.  The patients bladder had other plans and there was a small wait time.  This is the experiment...
It is a heat test for Bence-Jones protein.  It is an abnormal protein associated wiht multiple myelome (cancer of the plasma) and is not a good thing to have.  I could say more, but google it if you really care.  We were doing the test to see if a patient has this problem.  This is an old test, and since our lab doesn't have the machines available for this paticular test we needed the old school version.  Basically you heat urine to 60 degrees.  At 60 you may see crystals form on the bottom of the beaker of urine or you may not.  Then you continue to heat to 100 degrees and the crystals (if they had formed) should disappear.  Then allow the urine to cool back to 60 degrees and watch for the crystals to reform.  If there are crystals at 60, then no crystals at 100, and crystals again at 60, that is a positive test for Bence-Jones protein.  If none of the things happen it is a negative test.  Our test was negative.  Yeah for the patient!

Now that i have bored everyone to sleep with that explaination, I'll close by saying that it was a lot of fun and I learned quite a bit that I never expected to learn here in Africa.  Thanks to Sharon and Alex for moral support and humor, and to Liz for taking our pictures!