Skip to main content

Bloodwork

Every now and then, I need to have someone stab me in the elbow to draw blood. Usually, it's part of my yearly check ups and physical, but sometimes, I donate blood. Either way, someone with a medical degree gets to stab me. I've had to do it enough times where I'm used to it, but, somehow, it still leads to a few chuckles.

Take the last time that I donated blood. I made an appointment to get blood drawn, but I didn't realize that I was the last appointment for the day. Maybe it was because people wanted to be done for the day, or maybe they were trainees. Either way, I had a rather interesting experience. The technician/nurse/medically-trained person that did all of it had to ask a bunch of questions. It makes sense: you don't want to draw blood from someone with a high risk of disease or who might somehow taint the blood supply. That includes a bunch of questions about where I was born and my genetic lineage. That just blew the man away. He kept saying something to the effect of, "whoa! Really?" and he even commented that it must "blow people's minds."

From that moment on, I realized that this wasn't going to be your usual blood draw process. He also kept a boom box-looking radio handy, and we were regaled with 80s pop music while we were completing all of the pre-work. At one point, he even started singing along to Young MC's "Bust a Move." Well, heck, I know the words to that one, too. I don't think I've ever rapped along to anything when donating blood before.

When it came down to the actual blood draw, everything went fairly normally. However, the medical professionals have to check on you to make sure you're not feeling faint or otherwise in danger. That led to this exchange:

Medical Professional: "Hey, are you okay?"
Me: "Yeah, I'm doing all right."
Medical Professional: "Okay, just checking. You do have a needle in your arm, after all."

Yup, that's how it all went down. The whole thing cracked me up. I'm going to have to donate blood more often.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...

Dreams

Normally, I don't eat very many sweets. I tend to eat pretty generous portions, but I generally prefer savory food over sweet. In fact, I usually prefer things half as sweet when possible. My preference doesn't have anything to do with health reasons, it's just one of those things that I've always liked better. That said, I do inevitably eat dessert, particularly if I'm out with other people. My stance towards dessert is roughly equivalent to those who are social drinkers . If other people want to munch on something for dessert, I'm not about to cross my arms and refuse. That'd be just a tad gauche. So, I do eat some dessert. I even have a few standby favorites that I'll usually order when presented with them (brownies, creme brulee, and apple pie). But left to my own devices, I'm not about to go hunting for dessert. Apparently, this means that the sugar can really mess with my system under the right circumstances. As I've discovered, ...

New York City Trip (Day 1)

After my crappy flight , I was now in Newark, New Jersey at 7AM on a Friday morning. I had done a little bit of reading up, so I knew which bus I needed to take and where I was going to get off. All in all, getting into the city was surprisingly easy. I suppose speaking the language does make things simpler. Through no real planning of mine (a theme of the trip, at least on my part), I picked one of the later bus stops at which to get off, Grand Central. I actually just figured that getting off at Grand Central would give me options, and heck, it's called Grand Central. That just screamed "decent place to disembark that might be close to some stuff" to me, so that's where I got off. However, it also meant that we drove down 42 nd St to get to my bus stop. That just happens to be a big street, and it gave me a glimpse of Times Square as we drove by. My bus stop choice had accidentally given me a rough layout of the city. Go me. I had about 6 hours to kill...