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A typical day

Morning rounds on the leukemia ward: patients midway through chemotherapy with almost no immune system, where a fever at 3am is an emergency. Then the microscope, reading blood smears and bone marrow slides to make or confirm a diagnosis. Afternoon clinic: a lymphoma patient in remission, someone with a clot in the leg, a teenager with anemia whose numbers do not add up, a sickle cell patient you have known for years. A call from the blood bank about a patient whose antibodies make finding matched blood difficult. Academic hematologists keep a day or two a week for research.