Sanguine

It's 8:20 on a gloomy and damp Wednesday morning in March. Actually, it's March 17, St. Patrick's Day. I'm in my car, in the parking lot of a medical lab, waiting for someone to call me and tell me that it's time to come in and submit to a blood draw. 

I haven't had blood work, as the medical profession calls it, in a long time. This lab does not take appointments. You show up, you sign in, and you wait. So that's what I'm doing. I hope it won't be long. I haven't had any coffee yet, and I sorely need some. 

*****

I don't like to dunk on old people. First of all, it's mean. Secondly, it's stupid. I'm not young myself, after all, and it won't be long until I'm legitimately old and the damn young people will be mocking me. 

But even though I don’t like to make fun of old people in general, as a broad demographic, I will point out that many of the most senior of our citizens have what I would politely call a proprietary attitude toward doctor's offices and hospitals and pharmacies and labs (and the confession line at St. Patrick’s RC church on a Saturday afternoon, but that’s a story for another day). The medical facility is their territory, and they are not particularly welcoming toward intruders. I know the stink eye when I see it, and the old people behind me in the sign-in line definitely gave me the stink eye. Next time, if they want to protect their turf, they'll just have to get up a little earlier. Because you have to get up early in the morning to get past me. 

*****

An older man was also ahead of me in the sign-in line. He turned to hand me the clipboard after he signed in. Let me digress again and mention that the floor was marked off with blue tape placed at six-foot intervals, and all patients were instructed to sign in and then return to our cars to wait for the call to be bled, but we had to pass around the same germ-infested clipboard with its pen attached with a little beaded chain. The COVID procedures are less than consistent. The man, who was probably in his mid-70s, was very outdoorsy looking in a practical, farmer/gardener way; not a recreational, rock-climbing or mountain-biking way. White-haired and bearded, tall and imposing, he wore a dark brown canvas barn jacket, mud-caked work boots, and John Deere-style hat that looked like a giveaway from a feed store. He nodded politely at me as he handed me the clipboard, and he headed out to wait in his car. 

I wondered what, if anything, was wrong with the man, and what the lab was supposed to detect in his blood. Maybe he wondered what was wrong with me. Blood is such an intimate, private, messily human thing; and here we were, a group of strangers, all waiting to have it extracted from our bodies by a crisply efficient professional in a white coat. 

*****

I’m not especially afraid of needles. I don’t enjoy them, but I’m not especially afraid of them either. When it was my turn, I sat down as instructed, rolled up my sleeve, watched the phlebotomist tie a tourniquet around my arm, and then I turned my head. I’m not afraid of needles, but I don’t need to see a needle enter my arm and I definitely don’t need to see the blood coming out. A few minutes later, I turned my head again to see a tray with four neatly labeled vials of my own murky red blood, warm and viscous and dark. I walked back to my car, drove to the nearest cup of coffee, and went home. 

*****

It’s Friday now, and I have my results. The clinical lab at my doctor’s office shipped my blood straight to a specimen lab in North Carolina, where it was processed, analyzed, and (presumably) disposed of, all in two days. (I do wonder what they do with it, but not enough to look it up and find out. Maybe I’d rather not know). 

I read the lab report. All of those numbers, the white and red blood cell counts and differentials and oxygen levels and platelets and blood chemistry in infinitesimal measurements--it’s amazing to think that all of that is happening within my body, within everyone’s body.  I don’t know what any of the numbers mean, though, except that my cholesterol is high. I suppose I’ll have to do something about that. My doctor will have to decode the rest of it and tell me what it means. I hope that we’re all well and healthy; me and the rest of the Wednesday morning blood extraction gang. I feel connected to them somehow.