WARNING !!!
Those of a sqeamish disposition may wish to skip this post. It involves Blood......
Today I went to the local hospital for a follow-up appointment with the Rheumatology department.
I saw a new consultant, who was very nice and extremely thorough. In fact, I wish she wasn`t quite so thorough :-)
She decided to run a wide spectrum of blood tests, which involved 11 vials of my lifeblood being painfully extracted from my arm. Normally, I quite like giving blood.......but.....
The phlebotomist doing the sampling was a bit harrassed as it was a busy clinic, and like the helpful person I am, I proferred the arm with THE VEIN.
I am usually a bit difficult to get blood from, except from one lovely juicy vein which is well-hidden below a layer of fat.
In other words, it is easily accessible but not easily visible.
Instead, she chose to go for an attractive little number, easily visible but also a treacherous, rolling, superficial vein, which of course got punctured right through in the course of the procedure and I now have an enormous and painful bruise as a consequence.
I don`t know if she was inexperienced, or tired, harrassed, fed-up, distracted, or just didn`t like me pointing out my good arm, but for whatever reason, she chose differently.
She did apologise profusely for the colourful bruise, which is 2 and a half inches long and still expanding, and she obviously wasn`t aware that I am "staff" , but in the days when I had to take blood, if a pregnant client said she had a "better" arm for taking blood, I would always take her word for it. No -one likes to have a painful bruise, and if someone has had blood taken before, they usually know roughly where the good vein was located.
Perhaps I was just lucky to have been taught to take blood by a lovely and very experienced midwife named Irene, who taught me to learn to feel good veins with my fingers, not just go for ones that look good. And yes, Irene was a phenomenally good midwife all round !
I am sure there is a moral here...even if it is just to *not* rely on appearances, not to allow my eyes to be deceived by the apparently easy option handed on a plate, but to look deeper, to test the tree by its fruit. All that glitters is not gold......
After that, the six X-Rays that were taken of my chest, lower spine, hands, feet and hips were a doddle :-)
And courtesy of the good old NHS, I only have to wait 3 months until the next appointment to find out the results ................
3 comments:
Dear, dear Elizabeth, you sound like my father-in-law who has lousy veins. He requires weekly blood letting to get the correct dosage of a blood thinner figured out. But with lousy veins, it is tortureous. You have my sympathy. Those bruises can hurt terribly and for such a long time.
3 months wait for the results? Yikes!
Hope you feel better soon and the results are nothing but positive.
Hi Philippa
Don`t worry, it will take 3 months to have my next appointment, but if there are any major problems with any of the test results, the hospital will either contact my doctor, or will send me an earlier apoointment.
To a certain extent, no news is good news :-)
A visit to the rheumatologist? Poor you. I don't have to see mine now till Christmas (very festive). Hope the joints don't hurt too much.
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