#but then i saw rods in the gram neg vs. pos post.... and i was struck with such fear that i simply had to put pen to paper.

[monstercumhrt]

🚨 PSEUDOMONAS AERUGINOSA PROPAGANDA🚨

Listen. I can't speak outside of my profession — people in human medicine, please feel free to chime in — but what I can say is this: Pseudomonas aeruginosa is the bane of my existence in veterinary medicine.

You can smell a P. aeruginosa infection from across the room. It's the most distinctive scent. I am the only one in our hospital who volunteers to clean the ears of a patient infected with it, because my sense of smell is so poor... But this bacterium doesn't care — despite it all, it's scent still reaches me, and clings to my scrubs for the entire day. In particularly bad cases, I am barred from taking rooms for the rest of the day, lest I scare the clients away. I can only imagine the Hell that my coworkers must go through.

This is the only time I'll ever say this, but you don't even have to run a cytology to know what it is. But you know what we do run? Cultures. Because this son of a bitch is resistant to EVERYTHING. And it NEVER wants to go away. We have a patient who has had P. aeruginosa otitis externa for years, because it just keeps coming back. This bacterium strikes fear into the heart of every technician and veterinarian in the whole wide world.

And the worst part is? The owners never believe us on the first go. And so they don't come back for continued treatment... Until it returns in full force with a newfound resistance to the one antibiotic that actually worked well. And this infection is painful, beyond belief. There have been times where we've had to use lidocaine, while the patient is sedated -- to even clean the visible portion of the ear canal... Nevermind the inner canal.

I nominate Pseudomonas aeruginosa not because I love the bacterium, but because it's the only bacterium that has Demanded my respect and commanded my fear in such a way.

@bacteriashowdown