other duties as assigned

Bladder Control

Whitney Thompson, Event Services Senior Associate, SmithBucklin

O

ne of my accounts — who I’m not going to name — a medical group, had a meeting last year,

and one of the things we had to do for them, instead of providing cadavers (which is now against their bylaws), was to provide fresh pig bladders for them to do surgery on at the meeting. Not your everyday task, I guess you could say. We actually had to go through one of our doctors who used to work at a teaching hospital and had used the technique before. We were in New

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Orleans, so we had to find a local butcher who could provide them. And then the trickiest part was, once we had them transported in dry ice to the hotel, we had to find a safe way to store them in the hotel’s kitchen that didn’t get in the way of the chef and crew in their food preparations. To be honest, it really wasn’t even that big of an ordeal. I think we actually used FedEx. They were able to use dry ice from the butcher to send the blad- ders over to the hotel the night before, and then we stored them overnight in

that ice and opened them up the next morning so they were nice and fresh and ready to be cut into. It was a smaller group, so I think there were about a hundred bladders. We took them into the ballroom that we were in — and we did go through all the protocol for discarding them after- wards. You know, you can’t just throw them into the trashcan. The doctors had to wrap them in layers and layers of plastic, and then we had a service that discarded them for us.

. —As told to Katie Kervin PCMA.ORG

ILLUSTRATION BY GRAHAM ROUMIEU