Just Get The Needle Out and Be Done With It.

As you may or may not know, or care, I have a couple fancy named diseases…(none of them catching) so I have to get blood drawn fairly regularly. I think that it would be easier if they could just set up a port so I would be like a gas tank and just unscrew the lid and pour it out as they need it, because it is starting to get traumatic.

I must have bad Karma when it comes to giving blood. (Or getting blood hacked out of my body…) I think that perhaps in a past life I was a really mean nurse...or maybe one of those Civil War nurses that had to cut limbs off or something. What ever it is, the needle and I have some major disagreements.

It really started in College when I went to give blood. I was trying to be a good citizen and hear the call for blood donation. All I know is mass chaos ensued and I am pretty sure there is a nursing student that is still holding her knees and rocking back and forth in a padded room.

First she couldn’t find my vein. Then after rolling it about 10 times and then perforating it she decided to go for the other arm…at which point she got the needle in, but didn’t secure the tubing at the end very well…(I assume) She walked off to torture another student, and my needle started violently vibrating…which I later learned means that it was resting on the vein wall…

I tried to get her attention and when she went to adjust it the tubing fell off, I assume because blood started squirting out of my arm. I say assume because I really couldn't look...She then screamed a little, and 400 nurses came over.

They practically had to call Haz Mat, and they had more plastic covering their bodies and the floor as they cleaned up my little tiny pile of blood that had seeped out onto the arm of the chair and the floor. You would have thought I leaked Uranium.

At one point I believe I said “for crying out loud I will clean it up.” I don’t think that this was received very well…

I couldn’t bend my arms for two or three days and had welts the size of ping pong balls on the crook of both arms.

I walked out to meet Jamie and his best friend for lunch and Chris laughed and said (really loud) “You look like a Heroine Addict who didn't get it right” at which point everyone stopped and looked sadly at me wanting to dial the local drugs anonymous line and inform them of my existence. I didn’t find the humor in this much.

I have about 100 stories of my tortured veins, bruises and blood, but I won’t go into them. Other than to say that yesterday I had a similar thing happen with getting my blood drawn. I am glad it is winter because I can cover my track marks when I go to pick my kids up at school…

I am, however, wondering who I pissed off in a past life to make me get people who can’t read labs right and have to take second set of tests, try to re-poke the same vein, not be able to get it, go to another vein, and another, until they finally get one that has forgiven them for the first 3 horrible pokes, only to leave me looking like a human pin cushion with bruises the size of a small child running up and down my arms.

At least now the equipment doesn't leak blood out like a Steven King novel when things don't work...perhaps my padded room nurse invented it!