Blood

I'm participating in a medical study, and today I made my second visit. The first visit consisted of a questionnaire, some body measurements, and a whole lot of paperwork wherein I agreed that I understood to whom the information would be released and the purposes for which it would be used. Really, really a lot of paperwork.

Today's visit started last night with a 12-hour fast, so that when they drew my blood, it would not be full of sugar and caffeine, I guess. The fellow who drew my blood was also the fellow who had weighed and measured me before. This time I found out that he was a medic in the army and was in Iraq from 2002-4. He said that taking blood in the army was quite different because everyone was muscular and had veins that pretty much stood out. Although he'd been drawing blood for over 5 years, he said he'd learned a lot since working at the university medical center because here he got to work with so many different kinds of people and because he often gets to see the same people more than once. He was very good and took a lot of my blood pretty much painlessly. He also managed to talk about his 'first casualty' without it seeming gruesome, maudlin, callous, or any number of other ways it might come out.

The next step involved going to another building and waiting in a--yes--waiting room while many other people came and went. While there, I overheard a young man talking about his time in the military, how, just after boot camp, he'd found himself drawing blood from a bunch of new recruits, even though he had no training. He was assigned to clean the clinic, but the clinic was short of medics and knew they had a huge group of new recruits coming in. So they asked this young man if he could draw blood. He said he could and they asked him to demonstrate--on himself! Apparently he did fine, as he then went on to draw blood from the new recruits. In response to a question I couldn't hear, he explained that he had just completed boot camp and was in the mindset of proving himself and besides he'd watched a lot of medical shows on the Discovery Channel.

In our Peace Corps training we had to prick our own fingers and make a microscope slide of our blood, something we might have to do if we suspected we had malaria and were too sick to travel (the idea being that you could send your malaria slide to the nearest clinic where someone could look for malaria parasites in your blood). It is a difficult thing to intentionally prick your own finger deeply enough to squeeze a few drops of blood out, especially if you are imagining having to do it at some future date when you are alone, shivery with fever, and weakened with diarrhea. It was clearly much more challenging for some than others. I wonder how we would have fared if we'd been asked to draw a vial of our own blood?