I went to LabCorp at Providence Hospital to get blood drawn for lab work. When you come for routine tests like that, each person you interact with has to verify your identity by asking your last name and date of birth.
After having that interaction with the intake person, I sat down on one of the waiting room chairs until a young man stepped out and called my name (“Marc P.!”) and led me to the little cubicle-like space with the special chair with the wide arm rest, where they take your blood sample.
The young man, who introduced himself as Hector, was very pleasant. He could have been anywhere between … oh, I don’t know … maybe 24 and 35 years old. He asked me my last name and I said it, and then he asked politely, “And may I have your date of birth please?”
I said, “Sure. Can I have yours?”
He laughed.
As he assembled his equipment – the syringe and so forth – I noticed the large, colorful tattoo of a warrior’s sword on his forearm. (It would have been hard not to notice.) I pointed to it and said, “Is that what you’re going to draw my blood with?”
He laughed again, heartily. “Yep.” And then he asked me what I was doing the rest of the day, as he fastened the tourniquet on my arm.
I wondered if he was trained to put people at ease, and if asking them about their day was one of the techniques he’d learned for doing that. Anyway, he was good at it. Likable. Believable. It may or may not have been a script but his friendliness and even his interest felt sincere.
I asked him if people ever fainted when he took their blood. He said yes. I asked him what he did next when that happened. He said that usually people come to after a few moments.
“But some don’t?” I pursued.
“Some need a little more space,” he said. “We just give them time and a quiet place to rest …”
I do not remember his precise words. I’m pretty sure it was something like that though. In my mind, I was picturing him and perhaps two or three other med techs guiding and/or semi-lifting an unconscious person to a couch in some hidden room off to the side within the clinic. I wish I’d listened more closely to exactly what he actually said. Maybe I was distracted by the coming needle.
I asked him if he engaged people in light conversation to set them at ease, directing attention away from the needle. He acknowledged that they wanted people to be comfortable, but his response was professionally ambiguous and I allowed that.
After my (uneventful; no fainting) blood draw, he gave me a cup to pee in for my urine sample along with – to my surprise – a sealed antiseptic towelette. He had to describe for me twice what the protocol for collecting a urine sample was because it was something I’d never experienced before in all my decades of providing urine samples. The exchange felt a little awkward because when he said, “First, wipe yourself,” I was confused.
I said, “You mean I should wipe the tip of my penis before I pee?” (Never done before that in my life.)
He nodded, smiling with some relief apparently that I was willing to be graphic. The procedure was to wipe, pee a bit in the toilet, and then pee in the cup. “It’s called a mid-stream capture,” he explained. “When you’re done, just put your cup on that tray over there.”
“Got it,” I said. “So I guess you and I are done then. Good talking with you, Hector.”
He said, “Nice talking to you too!” and he smiled broadly.
I think he meant it.
Maybe he was happy to have the job, and meet all sorts of people, and have all kinds of little interactions that were over in a few minutes as he tied tourniquets tight around arms, found veins, extracted blood, and sealed and labeled little vials. Then again, he probably performed other tasks too, rotating with the other techs in the clinic. Still, I imagine that holding down the blood drawing station, person after person, arm after arm, day after day, would surely grow tiring year after year. It would have to be delivering diminishing returns, in terms of spiritual growth and insight into people, as time goes on. It seems like the sort of job people should do a few years and then cycle out of, like a form of service, which it is.
Medical personnel have power over patients. It can be very subtle, but there is an emotional vulnerability involved, and of course, the necessity for trust on the patient’s end, allowing strangers to put things in your body.
For example, I also went to an eye doctor last week, a cornea specialist, because I have an uncomfortable condition – recurrent tearing of my corneal (outer eyeball) cells, which hurts. I had never visited this particular doctor before, but I was excited to see a cornea specialist and get some clear information and possibly a treatment protocol. And in fact, that all happened, but the guy who put the drops in my eyes that, he said, would make my corneas easier for the doctor to examine, was very brisk. He scarcely said hello. I don’t think he even told me his name, come to think of it. He just directed me to lean my head back so he could squeeze in those drops, boink boink, into my trusting eyes.
That was a vulnerable moment too. I wasn’t afraid exactly but I did not feel entirely comfortable either. It would have taken very little to have made me feel comfortable. Maybe just a “Hello, how are you today?”
By contrast, insofar as I did experience some small emotional vulnerability as my blood was about to be drawn, I felt seen and respected by Hector. He obviously viewed me as a whole human being, and that was reassuring.
Now I wish I’d said something to him like, “You do a good job of setting a person at ease and helping me feel a little less vulnerable in that chair, with my arm extended for you to stick a needle in it, so thank you again. You are really good at what you do.”
I can just imagine Hector beaming after receiving such praise. But more importantly, he might have taken my words home with him and shared them with his partner or best friend as he talked about his day, and they might have been words he could remember about himself for a long time – that he was good at helping people feel at ease when they’re vulnerable, and that’s a great thing to be good at.
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