My valves are in the wrong place. They're right where any sensible phlebotomist would want to stick a needle and drain my blood, and that's bound to interfere. "Feel that roughness?" said the nurse as she placed my finger on the inside of my left elbow. She'd already gotten a dry hole on the right side, and this one wasn't looking good, "But it's the only vein you've got to use."
Gusher. Once the second needle went in, no problem. Not even that little twinge that usually comes every time you press the red rubber ball. I was bleeding like a champ, done in no time (I don't know how long, because the church has thoughtlessly taken down the clock in that room).
Oops, I spoke too soon. The last vial of blood for testing needed filling after the main bag and the first four tubes well full. and nothing. "Squeeze." Nothing. "Squeeze." Maybe a little. Finally the nurse called it a day and milked the rest from the tubing. I got an egg salad sandwich at the canteen and went off to lunch.
Giving blood has gotten much more complicated lately. First there was the bit about having to figure out whether the time you've spent in a list of 20 countries since 1980 adds up to 90 days or more. Then they stopped letting you fil in the form answering questions about what legal and illegal drugs you've taken, what diseases you've been exposed to, and the habits and ancestry of your sex partners -- a mind-numbingly bored and somewhat embarassed medical technician has to read the questions quietly while you try to remember which answers are supposed to be "yes" and which ones "no".
Well now they've decided to make things even more efficient by "putting it on the computer." So when you've read the "What you should know" list and totted up your Creuzfeld-Jakob Disease exposure index, you get a manila folder marked CONFIDENTIAL with nothing in it. You take your place on one of the benches in the hall and inch forward seat by seat, until you are called. Then a nice lady sitting behind a laptop computer at a desk with a wireless access point on it thanks you for coming in, apologies for the wait, and asks you to say your social security number out loud so everyone in the room can hear it. This identifies you to the database in the laptop, so instead of spinning the screen around to face you, she reads off your SSN, birthdate, address and phone number, and asks you whether those are correct. Then you sit for a minute and a printer on the desk spits out a perfect replica of the form you used to fill out by hand, complete to the "if you are a woman, have you ever been pregnant?" You would think their database would know.
You put your form in the file folder and sit on in line on a row of chairs to get your blood pressure, pulse and temperature checked. And a fingerstick for anemia testing (the tech nicely didn't put the lancet right on the ball of my index finger). Then another line for the personal questions and the bar-code figleaf that lets you admit to being horribly diseased without embarassment.
Maybe real soon now "the computer" will have a touch-screen interface, or a voice synthesizer, or something that will actually make it a useful addition to the process. But I'm not holding my breath. Bad for oxygenation, y'know.
Posted by wallich at April 21, 2003 06:09 PM