Parting With My Blood
Before I go anywhere with this post let me make this quite clear: I dislike blood tests. I never used to say that, but I've now come to the conclusion that I shall. I've only had three in my whole entire life (the third one today) and I thought I'd be quite calm about the whole thing. Like I'm generally a calm collected kind of person...and my first blood test wasn't actually that bad. Maybe the fact that my Mum and Hannah had been there and were making me laugh so much that I wasn't really taking note of what the guy was doing at my elbow. And the second time was by an old nurse over on the coast, so she was really swift, quick , and painless.
But today....*shudders* it was like going through some bizarrely thought up Chinese torture. First I thought I had to fast (I still don't know if I really had to or not) and so I hadn't eaten, and I always get slightly weak when I'm off food for a while. Then of course is the fact that I had to go all the way to town just to get this blood test, so the 6:30 wake up call and two hour long drive to town wasn't the greatest start. If you can avoid it, don't even do it on an empty stomach--it isn't overly nice.
Skipping all of the little incidents that happened and all the explanations thereof and going right on to the time when I stepped into the doctor's waiting room (it was empty at 10:15 in the morning of all things) I discovered the doctor wasn't actually behind schedule. Put it in the history books, folks, 'cause that's got to be the first time ever that I've had that happen before! Josh (he needed to see the doctor about his back which he's been having real troubles with growing pains lately) and I only had to sit there snickering over the pathetic show in TV for about five minutes before she came out looking for me.
This is the part where I think I was the most unagreeable person for the whole morning. Like, I don't see the doctor's in town (the one that's treating me lives about 12 hours away over on the coast), but they're the closests place I can go to get a blood test. So, I was trying my best to find the nicest way of saying, "Stop asking me questions; I just want a blood test!" and finally she said, "Okay, just go the door on the left down the hall and Shelly, our nurse, will take your blood."
Shelly is actually one of our sort of neighbours (see, they used to own the property beside us until they sold it a few months ago. They didn't live there, however, but on their other station that's closer to town), which was nice 'cause we'd met before. Predictably the first thing she said when she started probbing around looking for a vein was, "My, your arms are cold." I had three layers on and thought I felt nice and warm, but eeks, jolly thyroid problems...sometimes it's embarrassing to even shake someones hand 'cause I kow they're just going to say, "Wow! You're hands are like ice." I remember once my hands were so cold and we were going some place where I knew I was going to meet heaps of new people (and therefore have to shake many a hand) that I sat on my hands all the way there in a hopes of making them slightly warm.
But, anyhow, back to that white-walled room. Shelly was having trouble finding a decent sized vein. She reckoned it was probably because of the cold and the fact that my veins would have gone hiding to keep themselves warm. After a good few long seconds of her fingers probbing around inside the crook of my elbow, my hands were covered in cold sweat (isn't it weird how you think you're calm, yet you're showing every outward sign of nervousness?) when she said, "Okay, sharp jab." Trying not to look I noticed that one whole vial had filled up; she quickly removed it to push in the second on (she had a total of three!). A little splatter of blood spilled out into the vial and then nothing. "Oooh, that's weird," she muttered. She kept the needle in whilst trying to somehow coach blood into it by pushing around just above it. Nothing going. The seconds became longer and my hand began to tingle, then looking down I see my whole lower left arm start to take on this ghastly colour. I was like "*nervous laugh* My arm is going blue!" And it was...it was freaky. There was little spots of purple and blue, and all the while my hand is tingling from lack of blood and soaked in cold slimy swet. All this on an empty stomach--I began having these notions about how nice it would be just to faint.
Finally, Shelly was like, "It really doesn't look like this veins going to be cooperative and give us anymore." she slipped out the needle, "I'm going to have to try in the other arm." Oh, great...All I was thinking was how much my arm hurt after my other blood tests and how if she punctured both arms then I was going to be eating breakfast with my feet for a week! Prospects didn't look good...then my stomach bagan to get that real sick drop-gut feel. My head was feeling lighter. "I feel sick."
Shelly was the epithamy (is there such a word?) of calm. "Ok. Do you need to lay down? 'Cause just tell me if you ever do." At first I was thinking, "No, I'll be okay." but of course that's just that silly little voice that comes out and says one thing when two seconds later you realise it was the wrong thing. "Actually, laying down sounds like a good idea."
I had both sleeves of my jumper pushed up as far as they would go by this time and without her even having put the needle into my right arm yet, it looked an unhappy grey colour. She released and slipped off the little band that they wrap tightly around your upper arm, and bundled me onto one of those well-padded bench thingies.
When I go without food for a long while I usually start to feel weak and shake. I hadn't really hit that stage by then, but with the combination of sweating hands and lovely ideas of fainting, my legs had begun their own kind of trembling act.
I can't remember much of what happened next...not visual things, anyway. Like sitting up I can remember watching my left arm and the brown top of Shelly's head as she bent over it, but laying down I can't even really remember looking at the roof. I was kind of half blacked out and concentrating mostly on getting my legs to stop trembling. I can't remember the "sharp jab", just some vague idea of how it took forever from the time of her probbing incessantly around for a vein to the point where she walked to the other side of the room. I then realised she'd finished, and lifting my head a little noticed that she'd already taped a cotton ball over where she'd stuck in the needle.
She hadn't mentioned if she'd been able to get enough blood and I didn't remember to ask her until a good few minutes later when I was sitting up slightly drinking a glass of water. She had...thank goodness. I was starting to finally get my head back together again and it finaly struck me how funny I musted have looked sitting on the edge of the bench with my jumper (sweater) sleeves pushed way up my arms and these two white cotton balls in the crook of each arm stuck on with white sticky tape (she must have had trouble keeping on cotton balls before, 'cause those strips of sticky tape went nearly the full width around my arm...it seriously hurt when I went to pull them off later).
She was real nice about it all...like it could have been way worse if she'd been some crabby old nurse that only wanted to go home and spend time with her grandchildren, but man has that got to have been the worse fifteen minutes of my life. Dad let met grab some food from Penny's; I dozed on the way home (trying unsucessfully to find a way to lay that didn't increase the pain in my arms...); and went right back to bed the instant we got home. It was sometime in the afternoon and I didn't wake up until about 11:30, two hours ago, to a silent dark house.
My right arm doesn't hurt at all anymore, but something seriously went wrong when she was messing around in my left arm. It kills. It seems to have swollen up and I can feel the blood pulsing through it. Just...man. *shudder*
Moral of this rather lenghty story being: Beware all future nurses--Lyd doesn't like parting with her blood.
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