April 2, 2003
Lifetime lab partners
Ray and Priscilla Musser have combined 85 years at Munson
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Zeroing in on the century mark, Ray and Priscilla Musser already have 85 years of service at Munson Medical Center between them. During that time the lab technicians have watched methods and procedures change so they are hardly recognizable today.
"When we needed to sharpen a needle, we used a whetstone," recalled Ray, a native of Mancelona who works in the hematology lab. "We used to reuse all our needles and wash them up and sterilize them in an autoclave. Now everything is disposable."
"We used to do everything manually but the system now does it all and there are bar codes to track patients and tests," he noted. "It is a big challenge today, you're learning something new all the time."
Training methods have changed over the decades, too. Lab technicians today need a college degree whereas the Mussers both were hired with only a high school education. They learned their trade on the job.
"We had a plastic arm with veins filled with food coloring to practice drawing blood on," said Ray, who has been drawing blood throughout his career and early on mastered his faintness at the sight of blood. "Veins feel like a sponge so you train one finger to feel that."
The East Bay Township residents began their respective careers in 1959, Priscilla in June and Ray in December. They were married two weeks after Priscilla started her job and are heading toward their 44th wedding anniversary. Priscilla gave her new husband a tip about Munson after he was laid off from a construction job in Mancelona. He started in the kitchen but soon moved over to the lab, where he has been ever since.
Priscilla has always worked in the lab. She wove her hours around her family life, which now includes four grown sons and 10 grandchildren. She lost a year's seniority when she took time off to have her first baby but her 42 years of service is still an eye-popping number. The four decades have flown by in a blink, she noted.
"By the time we get ready to retire, no one will know us," she said.
The constant changes in their jobs have kept things interesting throughout the years.
"We have ongoing training and in services all the time and it seems like technology is moving faster and faster," said Priscilla, a native of Alba. "I just find it very interesting and exciting, you feel like you are really helping people."
The Mussers remember when the area did not have a blood bank, in the era before advanced storage and distribution methods centralized blood supply operations. Munson had its own list of donors and the Mussers would call people on the list any time of the day or night and ask them to come in. The lab technicians drew the blood and sent it to where it was needed in the hospital.
"We never did any HIV testing in them years," said Ray, who won a hospital Quality Achiever award two years ago. "Blood type and cross matching, that was it."
Although the lab is now open 24 hours a day, is used to close at 11 p.m. and reopen at 7 a.m. The Mussers rotated being on call with other employees and often were summoned back to work for emergency tests or blood draws.
For years, the couple juggled their shifts around their growing family, with one heading to work early and the other getting breakfast and putting the kids on the school bus. The roles reversed in afternoons. With their children grown, the couple now shares the same hours and enjoys commuting together for their early shift.
Vacations and holidays were sometimes dicey as one or the other would have to work. Priscilla acknowledges one man she worked with whose children were grown who volunteered to work Christmas for years so she could be with her family.
"The biggest challenge was the weekends and holidays," Priscilla said. "We still work two holidays a year and work every third weekend."
Besides his testing and blood drawing duties, Ray also helps trouble shoot and maintain the lab equipment.
"In the early years, we never had any preventative maintenance done so one of the med techs decided to write up weekly, monthly and yearly maintenance procedures so I took care of that," he said.