Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [11]
Although Steve never makes an appointment for a blood draw, he almost never has a wait at IDL. He needs to fast for certain tests, so we’re there first thing in the morning. Seriously groggy, Steve is like a big sedated dog that’s followed me into the waiting area. The receptionist’s window slides back, a courteous hello rings out, and Steve hands over his lab write-up. Usually, once he’s called inside, I sit down and use the time to catch up on ancient celebrity gossip. Today, with the permission of lab manager Rosemary Cozzo, I’ll be a fly on the sterile office wall.
IDL’s inner offices are as bright as a new refrigerator and divided into cool, white compartments. Steve, a foot taller than Rosemary, squeezes into one of the draw-station chairs as she studies the lab form. There’s not much room for spectating. I could easily get in her way. Fortunately she is someone over whose shoulder I can actually look, my five-eight to her five-one. As if someone has just said Go, she starts plucking empty vials, three purples, two yellows, and assembles the other equipment she’ll need.
Rosemary, who’s in her late fifties, could illustrate the dictionary definition for nurse (see also, efficiency). In her starched white, monogrammed lab coat, skirt, and low pumps, the only thing she’s missing is an old-fashioned nurse’s cap bobby-pinned to her no-fuss hair. She has a heart-shaped face and a warm smile. As she snaps on latex gloves, my eyes are drawn to a prominent vein on her left temple, a blue squiggle under her ivory skin. If Galen were here, I can’t help thinking, he would want to bleed from it. He devoted tremendous attention to mapping the body’s veins as sites for letting, everywhere from behind the ears to the roof of the mouth to the ankle. These days, by comparison, blood is almost always drawn from a vein in the crook of an elbow. If one is difficult to access—say, if a patient is obese—a vein on the leg might be used. There’s no such problem with Steve, who has lean, muscular arms and the big, ropy veins of a gladiator. Rosemary looks pleased, as does Steve, though for a different reason. Some days a newly trained staff person draws his blood, and that rarely goes well. Even before the needle is unsealed from its packet, Steve’s told me in the past, he can tell just how new a novice is.
“A newbie looks at your arms with a great deal of indecision, as if weighing a dozen options. But there are really only two: right arm or left,” he’s pointed out. “And when the person starts poking at your veins, self-narrating about which one looks best, this one, no, maybe this one, that’s when I think, This isn’t gonna be pleasant. It’s also a bad sign when the person rubs the alcohol on your arm like they’re trying to remove a tattoo.”
There have been mornings when I’ve been able to tell how rough a blood draw was by how damp Steve’s T-shirt is. “Three times,” he’d say, for instance, joining me in the waiting room. “Three times to get the needle in right.” Or sometimes he’d say nothing and just flash me his two bandaged arms.
With Rosemary, no uncertainty is betrayed, and this translates into a confident spearing of his vein. “It’s like cracking an egg without smashing the shell or breaking the yolk,” Steve has said; “swift and decisive.” I now watch her technique. The needle and housing come packaged like a vending-machine sandwich; Rosemary pops open the seal. She then ties a tourniquet to his left arm, swabs the distended vein,