I’d already explained, and so I thought she was going to go for a different vein in my arm. “That’s a blood clot,” I said again.
The phlebotomist ignored me, and went right for the spot in the crook in my elbow.
“I have a blood clot right there, you MAY NOT put that needle there!”
She ignored me till right as the needle came in at the spot and I was pulling away from it. Oh. A blood clot? Oh, okay. We’ll do the other arm, then. (Ya THINK!?) She then had a hard time getting blood to come forth, my veins having been fried by multiple IVs in the hospital shortly before, and yanked the needle around hard to and fro, up and down, to try to make it come. It was excruciating.
That was four years ago. Today, there was a new face in the lab (you know you go too often when you know all their faces, it’s a huge clinic) and she wrapped the tubing around that arm. No… Veins too small… Let’s try this one. Her face fell. Oh. That’s worse. Back to the first one, and she wrapped the tubing around it again.
Given the past experience–and of having informed the lab back then that that first worker was never to touch me again–all my pavlovian reactions surged forward. I debated the urge to say, You get one chance and one only and then I want the supervisor. But then I thought, if I make her nervous she’ll do a worse job, and if I’m rude she’ll hope I never come back (fat chance). So instead I silently said a prayer for her.
And lo and behold, I almost couldn’t feel the needle, and it certainly didn’t hurt. I didn’t look, so I was quite surprised to see, at the end, that she’d drawn four vials. I was sure they weren’t mine. There’s always that jerk of the needle as they change vials, and there was no tug at all. Surely…
…But no, she then took the computer printout with my name and patient number printed onto the stickers and wrapped a sticker around each of those vials. Man, she was good!
And I wonder now, if I’d prayed for that other woman, if it might have made a difference. Dunno. It would have in my attitude towards her, at least.