I don't need to know your story - I need you not to hurt me!

I hate arrogant know it all's who do not listen when you tell them something. Don't you? Today I had to have some blood drawn for some routine tests. I’ve become an expert of where you can and cannot take blood from me. I’ve had some horrible experiences with blood draws (flashback time):

Picture this, a cute curly haired Korean/White girl with reddish hair (yes it was reddish) sitting happily in the blood draw chair kicking her legs. Then the person who is going to draw her blood comes in with a person who is learning how to draw blood (insert tense music here - end of flashback).

I don’t remember how many times she did stick me, but blood was running down both of my arms. I also couldn’t bend them for two days because they hurt. As I got older I turned my fear around and decided that I will know where people can stick me to get blood. Which brings us to today…

She takes my left arm and decides she wants to go for the vein that runs down the outside of my arm closer to the elbow then the middle. I tell her “That one is really hard to get. The one in the middle is much easier.”

“Don’t worry hon I’ll get it.”

“I’m telling you I’ve had to do this a lot. It’s hard to get.”

She ignores me wipes it with alcohol and sticks me. Ok…so of course she doesn’t hit the vein. She just digs the needle around digging for the vein. “Oh, it moved on me.” Yeah yeah. She continues to move the needle around.

“Are you ok?” she asks. Because I think she can see the annoyed maybe pissed look on my face.

“Yep, I’m fine” she digs for another minute or so.

She takes the needle out and decides to try the other arm. I say “The one on this side that you can see blows very easy.” Which means the vein breaks.

“Oh, we’ll try it anyways.”

Me: (sigh)

“You must have deep veins.” which is code for I messed up so I’m going to make up excuses.

“No, I don’t actually.” and she ignores me.

She sticks the weak vein and gets enough blood out of it before…it blows. Now I’m going to have this cute bruise on my right arm. Yay!

If they would just listen to me we could avoid ME being harmed.

But at least I found out that today was her birthday, (she’s 51) that her son is back on R&R from Afghanistan (he’s in my prayers), that her older son is in Afghanistan as well, and is going to make the Army his career. The youngest one has killed 5 people and really hates the military, will be in on tour until January, and then has 3 months left before he’s done. OH, and don’t forget that on the Fourth of July her son helped her move because he decided he should help her while he’s here.

I know crazy people like me but is there a way to request a not crazy phlebotomist next time?