For 37 years, Oliver Meliza made a career of paying closer attention to your blood than you did.
As Allen County Regional Hospital’s chief medical technologist, Meliza’s role was to test and analyze the assortment of bodily fluids that influence the health of a patient — blood primarily, but he’s an expert on the less savory human liquids, too.
But, at 68, the hospital’s senior med tech is hanging up his hypodermic tips and his specimen cups and moving to Lawrence with his wife, Karen, to be nearer the couple’s children and grandchildren.
Meliza grew up in Garnett and joined the Army soon after graduation in 1965. It was not an idle time in American military history, and before the sun had set on his teenage years Meliza found himself in Vietnam, employed as a forward observer.
“Which means, you’re attached to a unit out in the field, calling in artillery,” explained Meliza, whose early post was as the immediate successor to a young soldier who had been killed when an R.P.G pierced the walls of the vehicle that held him.
Having received his fill of combat, the first lieutenant ended his three-year stint in the Army and returned to southeast Kansas.
Taking turns at the Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant, near De Soto, then at Thompson Poultry, in Iola, Meliza eventually heeded the counsel of his mother — a nurse’s aide at Anderson County Hospital, in charge of caring for the rows of newborns — who suggested that her son investigate a career in medical lab work.
After graduating from Emporia State University and completing his internship at Wesley Medical Center, in Wichita, Meliza seized on the job at the Iola hospital.
Having glimpsed the life of a big-city medical technologist during his post-graduate year, Meliza remained grateful throughout his career for the variety the rural hospital afforded someone with his credentials.
“We probably don’t do 1/20th of what they do in Wichita. They might do 600 [complete blood counts] in a day and we might do 30. In a smaller hospital, you get to do all the testing, whereas in a larger hospital you may be sitting at a microscope reading differentials for eight hours. I like being able to handle all aspects.”
According to Meliza, the hospital will engage a temporary technologist while it continues to search for his replacement.
It’s occasionally thankless work, and it would paint a false picture of the job to suggest that every interaction Meliza has with a patient is a rosy one. Advancing on a member of the public with a large needle or inviting them to urinate in a cup is not the most obvious means of endearing yourself to your neighbor.
But capturing these samples is only a portion of the job description; its real value depends on correct analysis.
To that end, Meliza has spent the greater part of his life bent over his tools, analyzing data, retrieving from the illegible slosh of the human body the lineaments of a vital code, which, if properly conveyed, may spell the difference between life and death.
“It was a good career,” says the understated Meliza. “Everybody’s got different aspirations as to what they want, but, for me, it was just always what I liked to do.”
Small hospital setting offered expanded role for med tech
