Amazingly, I didn't throw up

(And, if you feel at all like you might throw up or if you can't handle blood or ickiness in general -- you should completely avoid reading this post.  Don't say I didn't warn you.)

On Tuesday mornings I teach a four hour lab class.  I hadn't been in the lab since last Thursday because I knew I already had everything prepped for my students to arrive at 8:30.  At 8:15, I walked into the lab, took two steps, hit a wall of what can only be described as the stench of death, turned around and ran out. 

I'm a chemist, not a biologist.  There shouldn't be anything dead in my lab. 

I took a deep breath and walked back in.  I thought some rodent must have died in there over the weekend. I walked around carefully trying to keep my breakfast down trying to track down the source.

Then I saw the pool of blood.

That's right.  A pool of blood. 

I turned on my heel and walked out the door.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened.  The agriculture science lab above my chemistry lab is known as the "meats lab."  I don't know what exactly they study in there, really, but sometimes I walk by and see them butchering various thing.  And, apparently, they then store the cuts in a freezer.

A freezer with a bad compressor. 

When the compressor went down, everything defrosted.  And then the blood proceeded to drip through the floor.  Onto the floor below.  Partially onto the computer cabinet below.  The one that is storing the 10 computers that are essential to my students' work this semester.

You know, because floors in a science building certainly don't need to be able to contain the chemicals and blood and various other nasty stuff that we scientists deal with on a daily basis.  It's perfectly fine for them to be porous.  Once, we had a leak coming into that same lab and the dean came in and said "oh, that's just formaldehyde, that's no big deal."  Um, the big deal is that something is leaking through the ceiling onto my students' heads.  And it stinks!  I don't care what it is!  Make it stop!

Anyway, yeah, so my lab was canceled due to blood and the stench of death.  Because, that's what anyone needs early on a Tuesday morning.  And, especially a pregnant lady -- a pregnant vegetarian at that.  The smell of rotting meat.

I was able to bow out of helping with clean-up because pregnancy and death-stench and bleach and scrubbing don't go together particularly well.  I'm still not sure what's happened with the computers that were in the cabinet.  There are holes on top of the cabinet to allow heat to escape (since the computers stored inside it are plugged in to recharge).  Someone else was in charge of checking that.  I'm still afraid to open it tomorrow afternoon for my next lab.  I'm afraid to open the door to the lab even though several people spent hours with bleach yesterday in there.

On the plus side, I had four hours in my day that I hadn't expected to have.  That was awesome. 

And, I didn't throw up.