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Drawing blood


If you are Jackson Pollock you might have been able to do that literally - draw blood.  I mean it sounds abstract enough to me.  But this is about a more routine event not some stunning work of art.

I had to get my blood tested, and the medical term used by the clinicians is drawing blood.  As in they draw it out of your body into a vial or vials depending on what sort of tests you want done.

My doctor typically gets me to go and get it checked once a year to keep an eye on the goings on inside of me.  I know there must be a lot. Of goings on.  With the pounds of edible matter that I push down my gullet each day and the variety that makes up those pounds I am certain the bloody system is hard at work sorting, digesting, figuring out and filtering crap out while also creating new blood to keep the machinery working in tip top shape.

This procedure is conducted by people called Phlebotomists in a lab.  The technical term for the procedure itself is venipuncture.  So it was this morning after fasting for 10 hours (as in no food after dinner the night before) that I went and got punctured. 

My phlebotomist was a woman from the Philippines who seemed to be good at it.  I was sort of hoping I did not get the newbie who had a deer in headlights look on her and was tending to another specimen next to me.

My attendant wrapped a rubber tourniquet to my upper left arm that I proffered and tapped at the fossa, to see if she could spot a vein to puncture.  She couldn't.  So she briskly moved to the right arm and thought she had it.  I could not see any vein bulging to be the wellspring of blood.  But with a slight rubbing of the arm she deftly impaled a long needle into my arm cavity (fossa) and screwed on a vacuum tube and twisted it.  As soon as it did the arm squirted deep dark red fluid into the receptacle.  She did that four more times then pulled out the needle and stuck a piece of gauze on the puncture.  No spills.  I asked her if she has experienced leakage in her career and she said she had.  Usually the glass vials have a faulty seal and so blood seeps out under pressure.  Stuck some stickers on the tube to mark them for the tests and I was free to go.  Results of the analysis would arrive within 24 hours.  I and my doctor will pore over the constituent matter that made up my vital fluid including lipids and RBCs and WBCs and myriad other enzymes that would inform us of the state of the union and how well its been filtering bad stuff from the good.

Total time in lab 10 minutes.  Good enough since I needed to get out and end that fast.  Fast.
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