The chatty phlebotomist

I went to get a blood test early this morning (cholesterol, if you must know), and the skinny young woman who drew my blood was a bit of a trip. When I’ve had this sort of thing done before, the phlebotomist in question is usually some combination of cooly instructive (“make a fist,” “this will hurt a little bit,” etc.), polite and calm, and/or crabby (which is what I would be if my job was to draw people’s blood all day long).

Anyway, this woman comes into the waiting room, calls my name, and then, before I even can get up, she disappears down the hall. I catch up quickly. She’s at her station, getting her blood drawing stuff ready, and I take her lead and sit in the high chair next to her station. She’s already kind of going blah-blah-blah, but I’m not following it too closely yet. You have to fast for like 8 hours or something before a cholesterol blood test, so I hadn’t had my coffee (and was thus fuzzy), and I had just thrown on some sweats and a t-shirt. The t-shirt I was wearing is a really old one that says “duck duck duck” across the chest. “Duck duck duck,” she read as she tied off my arm right above the elbow with one of those rubber things.

“It’s in North Carolina. It’s a town called Duck.”

“Oh my God– I remember going to North Carolina when I was little, it was with my family, well, not really my family, but with my Dad and this friend of his and we were like on this boat and the cops pulled us over on this boat! can you believe it? I don’t know why, maybe they had beer or something, but can’t you drink beer in a boat? Anyway, it was in this really swampy area, I remember that, and blah-blah-blah-blah…” And on and on she chatters, the whole time working on my arm. It all made me a little nervous, the prospect of her jabbing this 2 inch needle into the softspot of my arm, but I have to say I didn’t feel a thing.

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