OUT FOR BLOOD: why my arms are black and blue

I won't preface this very much, because I am exhausted, stressed, and must go through all this again tomorrow. So because it's my blog and I can complain if I want to (and badly NEED to), here it is. I have to go back into the clinic tomorrow and report on this, which makes my stomach drop through the floor, but I feel I have to, for the sake of other patients who can't or won't complain (and most people don't).

Review posted online June 4

Bloodwork incident June 1/20    

On Monday, a technician in this clinic left large black and blue marks inside both arms when trying to draw blood. She poked and prodded, bent and held my arm down, went from one arm to another, then got 2 vials (they needed 3) and said it had stopped and she “didn’t have enough”. She finally called for another technician who drew the blood painlessly in about 30 seconds. Then my doctor said the results were “off” (lab error?) and I needed it done again! 

I have NEVER had this sort of experience in at least five years with this clinic. It has always been fast, efficient and painless. I do not know the person’s name, so I hope you keep records on this because I never want to go through this again. There was never an apology for the needless pain and anxiety/stress this caused.  Is there any way to arrange in advance or at least choose who does my blood draw? 

I assume this clinic wants feedback from patients if they have an incredibly stressful experience like this. If not, then the lab is remiss in providing the best service for patients, and I will have to go elsewhere. This did not need to happen, and I don’t want it to happen to anyone else.

Margaret Gunning

Surgery without anaesthetic? It happened to me

This was going to be tacked on to my last post  about my hatred and dread of doctors,  but it  began to spill out of me dreadfully today and I couldn't make it stop. I just hope I don't lose followers, as I did last  time I expressed anything really painful.  Only celebrities can "admit" to  traumatic experiences like this and get a readership spike. The rest of us, apparently, get the opposite.

On Monday night I got a call, out of the blue, during supper, that I had to have a "consultation  with a surgeon" (?) on WEDNESDAY, and to do my "cleanout" tomorrow. Cleanout? Oh yes, for the colonoscopy. (But nobody told me I had to -) Which  was on Wednesday, the day after tomorrow - two days, what, what?  - followed by "the surgery". I was completely unable to take any of this in, because it was said by a receptionist who talked very very  fast and was obviously at the end of her shift. When I began to ask desperate questions, the putdown vocal tone and "calm down now!" attitude immediately kicked in. Only when I asked her for clarification did she email me colonoscopy "prep" notes, but nothing more, except a  time and place.

The prep is better not talked about, not something for family viewing anyway, but it left me in a lot of pain in a very vulnerable area. In the hospital I was "prepped" for the procedure by a mechanically cheery nurse whom I heard say the exact same things to patients on the other side of the hospital curtain. The "surgeon", whom I had never met in my life before and whom I could not see because they had taken my glasses away, rattled on about "if I can do the procedure" (If?. . .  Procedure?), then I was pushed into the next room. I was hooked up to an IV, so I assumed it would  be like the last time I had one of these: I'd lie on my side, they'd turn on the juice, and it would be "bye-bye- land" until it was done.

Except.

There was none. 

No. None. NO ANAESTHETIC for the colonoscopy - I was awake and conscious for the entire 45-minute thing, which was like being  assaulted by a roto-rooter. At one point I began screaming - the pain was approaching the level of childbirth as the probe with the camera on the end punched and twisted and jabbed at the turns and folds inside my colon, and the nurse kept on telling me to keep quiet because I was disturbing the other patients. I asked why I was awake,  and I was told, in  a slightly indulgent, sighing tone, "Dr. So-and-so doubled the dose of pain medication," no doubt a ploy to get me to subside because I was making too much of a fuss. In other words, if you've had all that pain medication, you can't have any pain, so what are you complaining about?  But I was awake, and in extreme pain, and no one would explain anything to me as to WHY this needed to happen.  Nor was there any sense of apology for hurting me. Getting someone to listen was impossible.

After the "procedure", everyone rapidly exited the room and left me completely alone. No one asked me how I was doing (horrible) or if it still hurt (which it did, a lot, though today it is MUCH worse and at least a 7 or 8 out of 10). Nobody said anything at all because there was no one there. They just left, with no explanation of anything they had done, or why. Then my husband took me home. I was too dazed even to cry, although I don't remember feeling  this deeply violated in many, many years.

When my husband recently had his prostate surgery, he was treated like a king. His urologist spent 45 minutes with him carefully explaining what they were going to be doing (and he had several weeks of lead  time  to prepare himself emotionally). He was given a FIFTY-PAGE document to read outlining the procedure, including every conceivable outcome from best to worst, so he wouldn't have to face any surprises. The feeling was that "men feel awfully vulnerable about things like this, it's their manhood after all, so they need lots of reassurance," which he got - in spades, from the family as well as the medical support team.

After the surgery, he spent the night in a quiet, beautiful room that even had a restful view. I remember him telling me the food was great. When he got home the next day, the entire family pitched in to help, and there were many solicitous emails flying  back and forth - and they are STILL constantly asking him how he is, weeks later, though his recovery was textbook, he experienced no pain at all (he was given an epidural, which means he felt nothing below the waist), and is back to normal now. While I can't sit down because of the inflamed, toothachey sensation in my unmentionable parts, and keep getting waves of uncontrollable, deep shuddering that I know is the awakening of a very old trauma.

I am an older woman, I have had  psychiatric and addiction problems in the past, and I was deeply violated, including sexually violated, in the hospital system over and over again, but whenever I express the view that the medical community treats me with dismissal or even contempt because of that bottom-of-the-barrel status, I am met with eye-rolls, sighs and shaking heads (followed by walking away). How on earth could I even THINK this would affect the professionalism of the medical community, which is always completely impartial and  treats everyone with equal respect?

One doctor I had seen for fifteen years insisted that the medical community had nothing to do with my perception of mistreatment and that I "stigmatize myself". Doctors "would never" do anything so harmful to anyone, and "people like me" are never treated any differently, they're really quite tolerant of those kinds of things, so I had better "work on my attitude".

Apparently, nothing can or will be done about this, because in their minds,  nothing happened.  It's done, and I am in extreme pain. I can't talk about it either, it's too embarrassing and no one is interested, and even writing this now is a risk. I don't feel good about it, but I ask myself why I even write, if I must censor myself so carefully about things that affect me so profoundly. 

I know that nerve damage, which is what this feels like, may well be permanent. Doing a colonoscopy without anaesthetic means the body is tense, the muscles are tight, and the pain made me involuntarily thrash, though I could  vaguely see (without my glasses) two figures holding me down, one on either side, while she "did it". I could NOT "just hold still, it'll be over in a minute", said to me in exasperated  "we've got another one" end-of-shift tones. The best image I could conjure up was of a bad dog at the vet.

I was only to find out later that there was also a surgical procedure done, surgery without anaesthetic, because it was easier for her to do this (and FASTER - I think the main thing was that she could get out of there quickly) while I was fully conscious. I kept thinking of the dentist's scene in The Boys from Brazil, and I keep wondering - some dark, hidden, wounded part of me keeps wondering - why? Well, why did ANY of it happen anyway, my past which apparently cemented me into  a marginalized, silenced, powerless category from which there is no escape except death?

And why the sighing, the eye-rolling, the "we've got another one" attitude when I screamed out in pain? I don't remember pain like  that, ever, except perhaps in childbirth, or being sexually  assaulted over and over which also happened - but we don't write  about that, do we, or  express it, you must just keep it to yourself because it's "not nice", it's "nasty", I'm meant to deal with it like a mature person on my own, and besides, it "probably didn't happen anyway".

But this did.

This. Did.

Things fall apart: thoughts on the attack on Paris

This started out as a journal entry, then evolved from there. I have been known to delete posts that I later thought were too negative, just because I'd rather not put out that kind of energy. But today it's too much. I wonder now what it takes to go on about your business being cheerful and saying, "Yes, isn't it too bad." The feeling is, "if we feel gloomy the terrorists have won" and "everything happens for a reason" (!). This is about as helpful as saying "crying won't bring him back" and other stone-hearted, sappy bromides that are supposed to be so damn helpful. Our grief is being hijacked along with everything else. Put on a happy face. The problem is, I just can't do it any more.

November 14/15

Horrible terrorist attack in Paris yesterday. Out of the blue, seemingly. This stuff is popping up everywhere and makes me feel sick inside, like climate change. I wonder about the future, what kind of hell it might be for the grandkids, such wonderful souls. Irreplaceable. It could be a worse hell than the world has ever seen. People say things like, “oh, the human race has always kept going no matter what happens,” as if that's some kind of insurance policy against disaster.

Because something has been (more or less) true in the past does NOT mean it will be true in the future: in fact, the more time goes by, the higher the odds it will change. Example: "I’ve smoked cigarettes for 40 years and it hasn’t hurt me." That means you can go on for another 40 and be OK! It means that if it hasn’t happened YET, it will never happen, and CAN never happen, which is the stupidest piece of flawed non-logic I’ve ever seen. But I see it every single day, and people believe it, blandly, sticking a happy face on atrocity, which only leaves the door open for it to continue. It’s just a little thing called denial.

I never know how to get my head around all this, or how to feel. Things seem to be coming apart. When will it end? Nuclear war, I think. As if that threat is no longer there! Then the climate will truly collapse - it won't take more than a tiny nudge - and there will be no food. No food is already a huge one, along with where to live when everything is underwater. No food means riots and people tearing each other’s throats out to survive. Humans will revert to the pack mentality from which they sprang, devolving from apes into something somewhat less than that.

I have a purpose in my life, I am very clear about it and have no doubt of it, and that is to be love to my grandchildren. BE love, not just show love. This is nothing grand, but I don’t have to think about it either. It is as natural as breathing and has been the crown of my life after decades of wretched struggle. So many times I have wanted to end my life, but it looks as if it may be taken out of my hands.

At these times, anxious times, I look at my health and the fact that things have not been quite right for a long time. I had abdominal symptoms, quite severe ones that drove me to the doctor, something I only do under duress because I hate doctors. As usual, her attitude was dismissive, but she did delegate, as all doctors do now. I saw a gynaecologist, a urologist, a gastroenterologist, had two CT scans, two mammograms, a colonoscopy, and they supposedly found nothing. More than three years after being told my colonoscopy was completely normal (though my doctor was supposed to “go over the results” with me, an appointment which turned out to be totally useless because she said “there’s nothing to talk about”, as if this was a waste of her time), she was leafing through my chart and said, “Oh.”

Now, you never want to hear your doctor say, “Oh.”

The “oh” turned out to be the results of the colonoscopy. The polyp they found, the one they never told me about and which my doctor either didn't notice or didn't bother to mention, was not a large one, and not cancerous, but these things can turn cancerous in the future. Other things were wrong inside me that may or may not be a problem later, and which might lead to heavy bleeding or perhaps something worse than that.

My colonoscopy was not completely normal, as the technicians told me it was, but my doctor vagued me away because she didn’t really bother to look at the results.

OK, I don’t want to be one of these cranky old ladies who goes on and on about her health. For the most part I don’t talk about it at all because deep down, I don’t think I have much time left. In only a few months, without conscious effort, I have lost well over 30 pounds, and most of it dropped off me in almost alarming fashion. I was weight-obsessed from age 15 on, though I was never more than 15 or 20 pounds overweight (considered huge by the standards of the day). Thus began a siege on my body that left my metabolism permanently confused, if not completely fucked.

I ruined my body, in a sense, meaning there was a lot of fluctuation, some of it quite dramatic, and some really stupid diets, one of which left me 15 pounds underweight. I’ve never had so many compliments on my appearance in my life (oh, wait – there was that manic episode, the one that nearly killed me, when I supposedly looked 10 years younger! And certainly, if you look ten years younger, you no longer need to keep taking those stupid pills.)

So now my weight plummets, just from cutting out junk food. It’s still going down. I feel a vague nausea and my appetite is definitely down. So, do I go back to that doctor and say, “I’ve lost weight”, especially when she warned me I needed to lose weight and was verging on obesity? She'd probably say, "You look marvelous," and tell me there's nothing wrong.

This is why I don't want to go. Do I invite that familiar leaning forward and peering at me with puckered brow, then suddenly sitting up straight and saying in a decisive voice, “Nope. Can’t find anything”?

No.

Sometimes I think (to try to connect these thoughts together) that all of this is a death-march, that we just have to sing our marching songs as we go our merry way. I mainly want to stay around to help with the grandkids, if they survive. I am not yet sure of the nature of the disaster. Climate change experts are saying it could happen more catastrophically than anyone expects. It could all come apart, suddenly give way, as it seems to be already. Right now denial holds it all tenuously together, so that every extreme flood, every sinkhole swallowing up houses, every freak snowstorm or raging forest fire after a baffling drought is considered a separate event.

I get a queasy feeling from it all. When the food runs out. When the terrorists come HERE, not to France, not even to the United States but here. Don’t think about it, your health is bad enough. Die now? Might be a good idea, but it would upset my family, I think. 

I am too much of a coward to face the kind of world that is coming. So if “something” wants to carry me off, maybe it’s a lot more benevolent than it seems on the surface. What will be will be, but we always assume the people who mean the most to us will be spared. And that is the greatest uncertainty of all.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

What's under the label

Hey listen.  I have nothing against kids who have major problems "getting help". But what's the help? How competent is it? How medicalized has it become? Isn't it true that (especially in the age of split-second information-sharing) diagnoses can become faddish and even trendy? 

In my day, in the dark ages, we had a few labels too, and they were judgemental and not helpful at all: "slow". "Retarded". "Disobedient". "From a broken home." "Problem child." Now all these have been splintered into multiple diagnostic categories, but instead of having kids sit in the corner, we diagnose and prescribe for them.

This won't be a rant. I'm not against psychiatry or drugs. I'm not against saying, here and now, that when I was finally diagnosed bipolar at FIFTY years of age, and finally put on the right meds (lithium, the most basic treatment for BP) and found a decent shrink, probably the last one in the world, it was nothing short of a breakthrough for me. Decades of painful, sometimes agonizing confusion and pain and being chewed up by a heartless system were finally over. 

I think I began to get well when I began to object. Hey, wait a minute. This drug is making me sick. Hey! I don't think I have a personality disorder. ("How would you know? You have a personality disorder!"). I can argue with my shrink, who by the way is highly critical of the medical/psychiatric community and the way it operates. (This is the only reason I keep going back.) But kids aren't in a position to do this, and their parents are usually completely intimidated by "experts".

I so often hear, in any treatment of any sort of mental illness, how important it is to "get help". The person giving this sage advice, usually a non-professional, can then wash his/her hands of the whole thing. There.  I've said something helpful, haven't I? How could it be wrong to "get help"? Haven't we settled the matter? Why don't you go away now? Your pain and distress are making me extremely uncomfortable. Go get help. Goodbye.


(This could be a whole post on its own, but have you noticed how many articles giving expert advice on psychiatric matters are written by Joe Shmoe, some hack with NO qualifications whatsoever, only misguided opinions and a space to fill on a quasi-medical web site? But people lap this stuff up! It absolutely amazes and appalls me how many people believe practically everything they read. It's as bad as that meaningless phrase, "Statistics show." WHAT statistics? Show me! And even if they do exist, how skewed are they?)

But I digress. There's this term, iatrogenesis, and I like it not only for all those syllables (six!) and its odd look on the page, as if it's starting in the middle, but for its meaning: a condition caused or at least driven by the "cure". After a while it is self-causing and self-perpetuating and attains an awful autonomy. It goes around in endless circles, causing medical people to label it "hypochondria", or maybe even something worse that requires a new kind of medication.

Good help is hard to find.

I won't go into all of my history - I don't go in for that sort of thing, as I think it inspires vampire-like lust in readers, the "oh-poor-thing/thank-God-that-never-happened-to-me" syndrome. I'd rather be wildly admired for my brilliance than felt sorry for any day. It was a mess, a battlefield, one war after another, with long stretches of vibrant life - years, in fact - so that when I had to go back and "get help" once again, the unspoken subtext was, "Didn't you straighten all this out already?" What - you mean you're depressed AGAIN?

I remember seeing a piece in Psychology Today in the early '90s which had a revolutionary article in it with an idea so daring, so controversial that they almost never printed it at all.

Depression is a recurrent condition.

Recurrent?! Meaning: part of the human condition? Meaning (like most things) ongoing? Something you have to deal with each time you get up in the morning?

I thought that was called "life".

Prior to this earthshaking announcement, depression was supposed to be cured "by the book": by reading asinine pop-psychology books, most written by (again) non-professionals. I'm OK, You're OK. How to Be Your Own Best Friend. And (my worst pick of all) The Down Comforter, strongly implying that we really do enjoy wallowing in our depression and don't want to give it up. But I used to think these were sort of like diet books. If it works so goddamn well, why is there another one along a few months later that sells even better?

Anyway, I no longer give a fuck about most of this. I've had to learn to be selfish, though if I had not found real "help" after decades of horrific damage to my self-esteem, my identity and my soul, I might not be here to write this. It was not so many years ago I was seriously planning to jump off a bridge after taking all my meds. (It's always a good idea to commit suicide twice.)  What brought me to this state of despair was not my disease, but the appalling lack of understanding in the medical community of the nature of my problems. The abyss of loneliness was harrowing. As for the "help", there was a sense of "whaaaaat? You're back here again?" (Didn't we just see you fifteen years ago?) 

I really like the way this video is presented: simple, yet incredibly effective. And I am NOT "against" diagnosis or treatment or even drugs, when they are used prudently (and only when the response is positive and helpful. Dump the crappy drugs that don't work and make you feel sick!) But I begin to feel that the medical community is getting farther and farther away from its own humanity. It's convenient to box kids, dump them in a category, dose them. They will trudge into adulthood with their spirits dampened, the label still stuck to them, even if in tatters. Their hopes of ripping off that label to reveal the shining spirit beneath are starting to look depressingly dim.

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

An almost normal life

A young woman sits in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office. She flips through old magazines full of celebrity diets and recipes for lavish desserts, uninterested.

“OK, Sandra, you can go in now.”

Into the throne room. The palace of no return. Or something like that. Since her bipolar diagnosis (and why is everyone suddenly bipolar? Wasn’t it multiple personality disorder a few years ago?), everything has been turned upside-down.

She is on five different medications, two of them to deal with side effects from the other three. These are (supposedly) working in tandem at relatively low levels which are (supposedly) easier on body and brain. Or at least that’s the theory, until the next one comes along.

“Sandra.”

“Dr. Turnstile.” (She has never quite gotten used to that name, which made her guffaw the first time she heard it.)

“So how are we doing these days.”

Not a question, but a statement, always in the plural.

“Oh, we’re. .  . just fine. But to tell you the truth, doctor, it could be better.”

“Feeling a touch of depression lately?” (He picks up his clipboard and begins to make notes.

“A touch. It’s been. . .I don’t know. Remember I told you about my brother?”

”The one who got married last year.”

“No, the other one. I mean. . .”

“Refresh my memory.”

“The one I’ve been talking about for the past five sessions.”

“I detect a note of irritability.” He makes another note.

“Yes, a note. He’s in jail now. Embezzlement. The guy is just too clever for his own good. He’s appealing, of course. I don’t mean that kind of appealing.”

“Explain.”

“Never mind, it’s just a lame joke.”

“So apart from your brother going to jail. . . “

“Oh, everything’s just hunky-dory.”

“I detect a note of sarcasm.”

“That’s because I’m lying. Everything isn’t hunky-dory. You remember my boy friend, Robert –“

“The accountant."

“Lawyer. We broke up. It was. . . I don’t know, pretty bad.”

“Are you taking your medication?

She blinks. “I wouldn’t dream of going off it.”

“Would you like me to raise the doseage on the Seroquel?”

"No.”

“The Lamotrigine?”

“No.”

“The lithium?”

“No.”

“Then let’s discuss non-medication-oriented strategies for managing the mild depression you seem to be experiencing right now.”

“Strategies.”

“Yes. You remember what I told you in our previous sessions. The principles of cognitive therapy indicate that feelings arise from thoughts. If thoughts are excessively negative, emotions will soon follow suit.”

“I always had a problem with that one.”

“Yes, I realize there has been some resistance to treatment. This must be overcome if you are to become truly well.”

“Can I be truly well if I’m bipolar?”

“Not in the usual sense. But in a relative sense, as opposed to experiencing severe episodes, then it’s possible for someone with bipolar disorder to live an almost normal life."

“Almost normal. I see. So nut cases can only get so much better before they hit a wall.”

"Sandra, that is a completely irresponsible statement.”

“But I’m just sayin’. There’s only so far a bipolar can go. The chain is pretty short.”

“That’s why it is so imperative for you to adhere strictly to the principles of cognitive therapy.”

“You see, there’s where I can’t follow you. I find it hard to believe that every emotion is just an offshoot of a thought, and that every thought can be controlled.”

“Maybe not every thought. But people have more control than they think.”

“Do they now. Then I wonder why we even need medication.”

“Sandra, you know why. You have inherited a chemical imbalance of the brain which tends to trigger extreme mood swings, which in turn skews your thoughts toward the negative.”

“But the thoughts lead to the mood swings, don't they? I'm confused."

“There is no need to twist my words around."

“OK then, cognitive therapy. That means I’m supposed to reframe negative events – “

"Now you’re on the right track.”

“. . . Reframe negative events so that they become positive. Let’s see. So breaking up with Robert was really a good thing.”

“Yes, yes – continue – “

“No matter how much I loved him, I – I don’t know. I can’t think of anything.”

“How about this for an alternate hypothesis. There is a possibility that this breakup will free you to explore other possibilities. You’re young. There are other fish in the sea.”

“Other fish.”

“Maybe even better fish. Have you thought of that? And how about your brother? Can we shed a more positive light on his situation, which is, after all, self-created?"

“Oh, maybe he’ll turn his life around in jail. Have a religious conversion, write a book, marry some woman on the outside who’s willing to wait fifteen years until he gets out.”

“Again, the note of sarcasm.”

“Yeah, but I just can’t do this. This cognitive therapy, it implies we can control just about every thought, and thus every feeling that we have. We can just decide.”

“Yes, more than most people realize.”

“Isn’t this creating your own reality? Isn’t that what crazy people do?”

“Sandra, you are deliberately poking holes in the therapeutic process.”

“Poking holes. Doctor, I wish it were as simple as deciding how to feel.”

“But to a large extent, Sandra, it is. Cognitive therapy is, after all, the primary mode of treatment in modern therapeutic practice.”

"Then why have they stopped saying that about being gay?”

He looks disconcerted, puts down his clipboard.

“You know. They used to say being gay was something you could change if you just decided to. You know, made up your mind.”

“That was many years ago.” He shifts in his chair.

“In other words: yes, you might be attracted to men, but that’s a choice. You can choose something else, a girl in other words, any time you want to.”

“That’s very simplistic.” He is turning a shade of pink.

“But according to the principles of cognitive therapy, it should work. You should be able to change your feelings of attraction to men just by changing your thoughts. Am I right?”

”The DSM specifically states – “

“Forget the DSM. Say you’re gay. You want to be straight, or your mother wants you to be straight. Hell, let’s face it, even with the progress we’ve made, it’s still easier to be straight than gay. You don’t have to explain yourself all the time.  So, just change your thoughts about the subject and you won’t have those feelings any more! Think about girls instead. Finito. Problem solved.”

“We aren’t discussing sexual orientation now, Sandra.”

“Yes we are. Haven’t you been listening?”

Dr. Turnstile has the look of a fish sliding down a chute and landing helplessly in the ocean. It is imperative that they change the subject before he loses any more ground.

Sandra fixes him with her incandescent blue eyes.

“It just comes down to a decision. Am I right? But the thing is, doctor – you haven’t made that decision yet. Have you?”

A young woman sits in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office. She flips through an old magazine with screaming headlines about Lindsay Lohan’s latest arrest on the cover, bored.

“OK, Sandra, you can go in now.”

She tosses the magazine on the table, gets up from her chair and walks into Dr. Turnstile’s office.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

Blood sacrifice: or, why I hate going to the clinic

This is still so traumatic that I haven't even been able to write about it in my private journal. I sit here this morning after a lousy night, waking repeatedly and full of anxiety, trying to get through my giant mug of coffee and make sense of it all.

I'm not sure yet if I was the victim of medical mauling, or my own aging physiology. Though the pictures here are trying to help me play this for laughs, it wasn't too goddamn funny.

For medical reasons I won't go into, I need to give blood samples at intervals for analyses of cholesterol, glycogen, that kidney stuff I can't remember - all that shit - so there's no way around this visit to the clinic and the dreaded arm-stick.



Does it make sense to you to say I've never enjoyed this? Eons ago when I was pregnant, we first ran into my little problem: the technician (I think it was a nurse back then, before every medical procedure was farmed out to a different specialist)could not always score a direct hit on a vein. This involved (if they were shitty at it, which most of them were) repeated poking, twisting, trying the other arm, and a growing irritability towards ME for holding things up with my difficult veins.

Back then, if it didn't go well, I'd really hold things up by fainting. By now I've got past all that, but in recent years, after a stretch of relative normalcy (i.e. only five or six tries, leaving a black and blue mark 2 or 3 inches in diameter), things got much worse.

At first it was intermittent: some days the technician (usually one of the more competent ones who show up randomly on good days) seemed to get it bang-on and it would all be over relatively quickly. Sometimes it took forever because the needle was not all the way in or in at an angle, and the slow, painful dripping would go on and on. I needed to fill four or five of those little bottle-y things for some reason, and I wouldn't watch, though the technician acted surprised that I didn't want to eyeball the whole procedure (complete with a needle lifting up the skin in a point as it cranked around and around and around in a futile search for a viable vein). I had learned to cope, and as usual my coping methods were suspect and probably wrong.

There were some highlights, or lowlights to this process. Once a hysterical-looking technician had an anxiety fit and asked me, almost wild-eyed, if I was always like this and what was the matter with me. She had insisted on applying the tourniquet very loosely on top of a thick sweater to avoid bruising, though none of the others ever did this. She seemed to be sweating with dread. It took her a long time, but at least she didn't call in a second technician, something that seemed to be happening with alarming frequency.

To call in a backup is a disgrace because it makes them look incompetent, wastes a lot of time (there are other customers waiting, after all, customers with normal-sized veins),and make no mistake, *I* am the cause of this holdup and making everyone look bad. I'm making it look as if they don't know their stuff!

The fact that every so often someone would show up, touch my arm with a fingertip, aim, shoot, and hit it bang-on with no trouble, drawing the sample in 2 minutes, did make me wonder about competence and dealing with non-standard veins. But in reality, my veins were treated like an aberration, something they had never seen before, as if I had walked in with two heads.

The explanation, if I got one at all, was that my veins were small, deeply set in my arm, and moved around a lot (probably because they were small and deeply set in my arm). Trying to inflate them with a super-tight tourniquet seemed like a good idea to me, but they wouldn't do it because their training told them they weren't supposed to.

The over-the-sweater-sleeve tourniquet technique may be OK for a normie, but for me it's a disaster. But I can't tell them to make it tighter, can I? I will get that "whaaaaaat?" look. And why don't they do that little two-fingered tap-tap on the spot any more? Will it be too traumatic and painful? Will it cause. . .  bruising? But it can't cause the kind of lead-pipe black-and-blue mark I come away with after a typical bloodletting ordeal.

Can I even pick a "worst"? At least up until yesterday's debacle, that would be the young trainee who poked and prodded in the usual way, skidded over my arm which finally began to bleed furiously (though not into the tube), giggled, yanked it out, halfway capped the tube and began shaking it violently. Blood flew through the air and splashed all over the front of my blouse, ruining it. She giggled some more. "Gee! That's never happened to me before!"

Translation: there must be something wrong with YOU. You are a freak. A nineteen-foot-tall Atomic Woman stalking Port Coquitlam. 



When I try to tell this story to anyone with a medical background, they say something like, "Oh, that didn't happen. The cap can't come off like that. You couldn't be sprayed with blood." It's great to be listened to, isn't it? How I wish now that I had immediately complained to the front desk, ripping open my jacket to expose the gobs of gore.

So on it went, every three months forever. The bad episodes were intermittent, and I found tricks that I thought worked, kneading and slapping the crook of my arm, swinging my arm as I walked over to the clinic, pumping gallons of water like someone said I wasn't doing. 

Whistling in the dark. Putting out a forest fire by peeing on it. Peeling a turnip with a stone.

So yesterday it gets bad. WAY bad. I arrived on time, sat dutifully in the waiting room and was able to go in almost right away. I said a little prayer, not so much for my inaccessible veins as for the idiots who couldn't find one and turn on the tap.

This was it, the day it got more than bad. WAY more.

The technician walked in. She was one of the more senior ones and seemed to know what she was doing. But on her first poke, her face fell in that dreaded, all-too-familiar, this-is-going-to-take-up-way-too-much-time way.

"Is the other side any better?" She had done me maybe fourteen times already, but acted as if she had no idea who I was and addressed me as a complete stranger.

"No."

"Let's try it, then."

No dice, just nothing. That little gleaming device was like a drill-bit, twisting around and poking and jabbing. I tried not to wince, but it hurt like hell and I knew it wasn't supposed to.

"Sorry, am I hurting you?"

"Oh, no."

Then came the dreaded "calling in another technician" manoevre.

A younger woman with long dark hair and glasses, very poised, very serious, almost doctor-like in her sense of entitlement, swept in. A resident fulfilling a training requirement, maybe. (She was even holding a clipboard.) There was something Special about her. She was the one they called in for Special Cases, when someone became hysterical, fainted or attacked someone in frustration after being fruitlessly drilled for half an hour.

"Let's see what we have here," she said, crisply and calmly, not making eye contact.



She shook her attractive medical head and began to poke into me again.

"Oh, sorry, no, we can't. . . " Weirdly, the first technician hung around. That had never happened before.

At one point I noticed her pressing on my opposite wrist, which already had a huge, godawful plastic clamp on it that left a red welt.

After ten or fifteen pointless minutes, during which I gabbled on and on in explanation, irritating them as I always do when I try to explain anything I clearly don't understand (though not explaining would be even worse because I was being unco-operative and sullen), they gave up on the traditional method. The two of them were beginning to turn away and whisper to each other. I was alarmed. I heard words like "butterfly" and "back of the hand".

They used the butterfly. I've had the butterfly before, and it's no big deal, just another method of jabbing your flesh to suck up your blood, but the butterfly didn't work this time.

At all.

Not a drop.

Now they were really nonplussed. (Yes, that is correct, so don't correct me! Look it up.) They kept looking at my right hand and pressing down and pumping it. Anything there? You would have thought so: I'm old enough now to have those blue veins you see on little old ladies.

"Will this hurt?" I shouldn't have asked: I'd had the back-of-the-hand treatment before, and I knew it hurt.

"Yes, it hurts most people, but we'll try to be quick."

Quick, like. . . ten more minutes?

I stayed calm, but at a cost. I prayed they would get something, even a little bit. Suddenly I remembered a dreaded word as they stepped away to whisper and natter at each other yet again. 

Cutdown.



I knew that if they couldn't get blood any other way, they just used a scalpel and cut you open. Presumably they tied off the vein after the Niagara Falls of blood gushed across the room.

"Oh, no, that's only in the hospital." The two of them, alarmed, looked at each other uneasily. She was having delusions, wasn't she?

Meanwhile, the hand thing wasn't working at all. I had my eyes closed and willed myself to relax, but the first technician took it as dread and panic and asked me - no, I am not kidding about this, "Would you like me to hold your hand?"

"Oh, wait. I think I see something."

A drop!

"Uh, yes, but. . ."

"It's very, very slow."

Drip.(25 seconds)

Drip. (25 seconds)

Drip. (25 seconds)

Drip. (25 seconds)

It took almost half an hour to partially fill a vial, and they were not at all sure it was enough. I prayed they would put the cap on before they shook it. There came another round of flustered, whispered consultation.

I was a freak, a weirdo, something they had never seen in their lives before.

THEY WERE TRYING TO GET BLOOD FROM A TURNIP.

Then came the reasons why, all having to do with me. "You're dehydrated, dear. You'll have to start drinking water."

I didn't know how to tell her that I always pound back water before a test: it helps my creatinine levels. (THAT'S the shit from my kidneys.)

"Maybe you're a little bit anemic." My hemoglobin was always routinely tested, and it was normal. Had never been abnormal. But they treated me as if they could see through me.

"You do look a little blue," the entitled one said.

I can't imagine why.

No one apologized, but there was a funny feeling *I* should have, for taking up 40 minutes for what should have been a 3-minute procedure. At least there was no indelible gore-splatter down the front of my blouse.

I decided then and there to change clinics, but what good would it do? If I started fresh and just told them nothing, might they just score first try? Bingo?

Of course I had to look all this up on the internet, and two seconds later I hit pay dirt. It was a forum about donating blood, and one woman recounted in frustration being turned away because she had "bad veins".

"My veins are small and deep and they slip around and they can't seem to get into them at all. The butterfly doesn't work, the back of the hand doesn't work. Nothing works."

Another post: "Why are my veins so hard to access? The technicians are getting really annoyed with me. The veins are small and deep and they slip around and they can't seem to. . . "

Fifty thousand entries later, all of them virtually identical, a picture was emerging.

SURPRISE. Some people's veins are not very accessible because they are . . . you get the picture. But at the clinic, they were anxious, astonished and even irritated to find that they just couldn't get me to act like a stuck pig, no matter what they tried. In fact they behaved as if they had never seen anything like this in thirty years of experience.

I have often had the experience, when trying to explain something to a medical person, that they think I'm  making up stories. At very least, it's hypochondria, being dramatic and inflating my symptoms out of sheer narcissism. Was my body lying to them this time, I wonder? Being narcissistic, or deliberately making a fool of them? Apparently.

Almost worse is something I hear often when I make the mistake of "sharing" my experiences with anyone. The listener's eyes fly open and they say, "Oh, that's never happened to ME!" This is called "empathy" and is more common than you might think.

Though such people always advise you (right after telling you to throw away those pills and take milk thistle) to make medical people do what you want, it's a great way to attract the hostile stare. And whatever you do, do not ever, ever, EVER mention the internet to a doctor, or their eyes will glaze over. "Don't go on the internet," I've been told, how many times? Medicine hates the information age because it penetrates the hallowed brotherhood that began eons ago with the local shaman.

I didn't cry or whimper or faint, though many people routinely cry and whimper and faint even when their blood-draw is quick and painless. But I don't look forward to going through this every three months. Hell, the back-of-the-hand thing is foolproof, it HAS to work!

I can't go back there because, against reason, *I* am embarrassed. I will try another place. But if they come at me with a scalpel, I am out of there.

Post-blog observations. It's been a while since I originally posted this, and yes, I DID find another lab. I didn't say a thing about my "little problem" because I wanted to see what would happen if they didn't know about it.

The technician, a brisk, no-nonsense lady with a Germanic accent, whisked into my vein and out again in about 30 seconds: no poking, no pain, just a direct stab and a steady flow of blood.

Miracle of miracles! But it HAD to be a fluke. I went back in three months, got a different technician, but exactly the same results.

This was a magic place!

And it went on for, oh, a year and a half at least. Pay dirt every time. Every three months, no matter who did the procedure, they always struck oil. And then. . . "something" happened.

I think it was a trainee or something, and she had some problems with me. She asked me all the usual questions: "Has this happened before? Does this always happen?" After all the usual drilling and twisting and pain, some blood came out. Slowly.

The next time wasn't much better. It was more difficult, time-consuming, clumsier, with more of those strange, uncomfortable "looks". This wasn't a new set of technicians. Some of them I'd already had before, with no problems.

Yesterday, it collapsed. The whole structure of hope and freedom from the sickening, accusing questions came crashing down on me. They couldn't get blood. "Does this. . . you know. . . has this. . ." The consternation, the projected shame at feeling incompetent which was somehow meant to be absorbed by the patient.

I have no idea what I'm doing: sucking my veins in, then letting them out again? I always drink water, etc., blather blather blather, and stand upside down and shake myself like a ketchup bottle for an hour before the drilling. No dice. Nevertheless, they always mention something I "should" be doing, some vital preparation no one told me about before, to avoid holding up the whole enterprise.

Last night I got a call from the lab. That's right. From the lab. There was something wrong with the sample they had finally, laboriously drawn. It had clots in it, making me think it had come out too slowly or had been contaminated in some way. So on a Saturday morning, because they close at noon, I have to go back in and go through the whole ordeal again, likely sitting for an hour in a patient-crammed waiting room full of whining toddlers, non-bathers and people clearing their throats every 30 seconds.

And when it's finally my turn to be stuck, being asked, in puzzled half-contemptuous amazement, "Has this ever happened to you before?"

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home