Before every chemo round, a couple of days ahead, you have a blood test and a chat with your oncologist to see how you feel, especially with side effects. The blood test is important since they check things with funny names such as hemoglobin (and not him-the-goblin as my chemo brain keeps trying to make me say out loud) and weird abbreviations that have something to do with your liver and others that are tumor markers. Bottom line, it’s to check if your immune system can take another hit, otherwise you postpone a bit.
That’s all great and I’m all for it.
I am not however a fan of the blood test💉
No, I don’t have a phobia of needles, but my veins do. Somehow they sense it and they shove themselves deep in my arms, attempting to not be found. This leads to the unlucky person, who has to puncture me, to go on a wild hunt, by tapping my arm for a good few minutes (most of them start humming things like “Where are you?” “Show yourself” “Open says I” under their breath) and then proceed to the other arm, only to come back to the first one. They then insert the needle, wriggle it around (as if that will make the vein pop up) and then accept their failure and try the other arm🙄 Some are stubborn and try at least twice on both arms before they ask for a colleague to help them. Some decide that giving me more needle bruises isn’t ideal, and ask for help after two tries.
The record has been four needle punctures on each arm🏆
However, I will never forget the ER guy who just looked at both arms and then, as I was talking to the other doctor and was distracted, put the needle in my wrist and got the amount of blood he needed in seconds. It stung, but I didn’t complain. He did apologise and jokingly said “the veins in your arms are invisible, it was either your wrist or a nosebleed”. I thought that was a great idea!🙃
So, I asked the nurse who was looking for my vein today, “shall we try a nosebleed?”. She didn’t find it funny. She punctured me two times and then her colleague another two before they got anything out of me. I left by saying that the nosebleed would have worked faster and it felt good. Small petty wins, people.
Small👏Petty👏Wins👏
