The funnest part of your CBC is making blood smears. And it's usually the vein of people's existence, but we are going to make it so you don't have any problems by the time this video is over. First thing is you want to have a well mixed, unclotted ETA tube. Obviously, you want to mix it gently, you don't want to be shaking it. If you are concerned there may be clot in the sample, which is obviously going to affect your numerical parameters, most notably your platelets, you can take an applicator stick and just run it through your sample. And if there are any clots in there, it will adhere to your applicator stick. So if you don't have that, you know you have a good sample. The number one thing of making good smears is you want to make sure that you have beveled slides. That is hugely important. It's almost impossible to make good blood smears without that as your tool. And they can be used just for spreading if economy is an issue. You want to start out with a well filled PCV tube to get a decent sized drop to make your smear. So this is not considered well filled. What happens is you just get a very tiny drop, which results in a very tiny smear. And it's hard to do blood smears on something that is very small. The other reverse of that is where you kind of lose control and your drop size is too huge and it's really hard to make a blood smear out of that as well. So you want to be like a goldilocks and the three bears and get your blood dropped just right. So again, fill it about three quarters full. If you are having trouble filling your tube, just hold it at a bit of an angle and gravity will be your friend and freely flow into that tube. So you just want a medium sized drop just above your frosted edge if you have frosted slides. Now, I'm going to show some of the don'ts before I show the best way to do it. There are several pitfalls that people routinely do and if you eliminate any or all of those your slides will be good. Okay, so the first one is the Olympic ski jump technique, which is very common. People start out all right but then they end up leaving the slide and end up by your head and you end up basically with what is a line preparation, which is good for cytology but it is not so good for blood smears. The other thing is sometimes people go very slowly and admire their work as they go. Faster is better. And notice I'm flipping this spreader slide over so you can use both sides of your spreader and you can use the top and the bottom. So you have four potential uses out of one slide. So when you go too slowly, you end up with going right off the edge of your slide and again you don't end up with a nice thumb shaped smear that we are all striving for. The other thing people do is the race car rev and that one is not really a bad thing to do but it's kind of a waste of time and I think it makes people anxious. So that's when you go like this and you get already to go and you bring it in and then you finally spread it out. So it may or may not work for you but again can save your energy. Another thing that happens is people will pull instead of push to make their smears and that results in some very interesting shapes and you don't have as much control. So this is not a recommended way to do it either. You'll notice how thick that smear came out to be and that is very hard to do blood smear evaluation on. The other thing is to don't apply pressure. If you hear grinding, this is kind of annoying but if you hear grinding on your bottom slide you've pressed too hard and again you get very uneven production. And then the last thing is called my shaky slide syndrome and it again is very common. It's where you take your spreader and you're holding it too high up and so then you don't have any control over the bottom pressure and you get all wobbly as you can go down on your slide. So I'm going to show you the right way to do it and then everything will be forever lovely. Okay, so again we have our three goldilocks properly sized dropped. You want to hold your spreader at about 45 degrees. Now you might have to alter that a little bit depending on the PCV of your patient. You want to anchor your side with your index finger. You don't need to put your whole arm on there because the slide isn't going anywhere. And also we don't recommend putting a finger on the middle because that creates a pressure that seems to create a heaviness to the middle of the smear. So just hold it on either side about three quarters of the way down and as soon as the blood crosses the spreader to a reasonable amount. So three quarters of the way across push it out as fast as you can. So you want to be like Usain Bolt in a 100 meter dash in out. And again you can use the bottom slide as a spreader again as fast as you can and just jam the spreader into the end of the slide and your index finger. And that should you should end up with good slide preparation after that with your thumbnail shape. So all that said it's better to submit a poor slide than no slide at all because the cells disintegrate overnight and it's much better to have any preparation. And keep blood smear separate from any formal and containing vessels because it wrecks the cells you can't see anything. There are slide containers that you can mail things in. This one obviously holds two. This one holds about five or six and they are available at our lab if you need some. That said you should still wrap them in bubble wrap or something. I wouldn't just put these in an envelope and ship them on their on their merry way but protect them from flies, dirt, water, slides from each other. These people accidentally put them on top of each other when they're still wet. And as with anything we want to label our samples. So it's good to put your some animal ID whether it be the owner or the patient's name and the patient's name and the owner is preferable because we get a lot of daisies and it doesn't hurt to also have the date on their or the date on your tube and minimally the requisition because we do have a time limit for running our CBCs through our automated analyzer three days after collection as far as we will go. Once your smears have air dried you want to stain them if you want to look at them yourself if you are sending them to a reference lab it's best to leave them unstained. You have to dip them in each solution five times one second per dip. The last solution is water and just make sure that you keep that clean at the end. And if you have any problems remembering the order of your stains on your bench just remember it goes from lightest to darkest. So you're just going to dip it very slowly and patiently. The last solution is kind of a combination of dipping and swirling. Then you let it air dry and you can just blot the bottom off and wipe off the back. And in our lab to protect the sides we cover slip slip them with the mounting media and cover slip once they have been stained.