Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Needles

Should I be afraid that the veins in my arms are going to either blow up or disappear one day?

I think my left arm isn’t very good anymore.  I used to have no problem getting bloodwork done from both arms, but within the last year I’ve had multiple people tell me there’s not much there anymore and a few others try and miserably fail, resulting in two sticks.

My right arm vein is pretty knobby, but I’m guessing there’s a lifespan for everything.
Well yesterday, on my day off from work, DH and I headed downstate  2 hours to Pougkeepsie to do the bloodwork scheduled by my MFM.

That resulted in about 12 tubes of blood being taken.  She tried with a butterfly needle but it kept getting clogged, so she pulled that out and used a straight needle, filling up the rest of tubes. So  each of the tubes got two different sets of blood.

I mean, it’s all my blood and it was only about a minute apart, so that should be ok, right?

Because I’m just waiting for the phone call that tells me they made a mistake, that I need to come down again, that they didn’t take enough, or they lost the tubes they did take. I mean, it’s always something.
And also, I woke up at 5am yesterday in a little pain, probably caused by snowshoeing the day before, and since I was only half lucid, I quickly swallowed two ibuprofen before I thought, “Hmm, shouldn’t have done that.”

Because it was a fasting blood test.

And not that I understand why this bloodwork had to be done on a fasting level, by any means, since it has nothing to do with glucose, but since we’re looking at genes and antibodies and anticoagulation – it strikes me that taking ibuprofen was the wrong thing to do and might mess up my numbers. I mean, you’re not supposed to take aspirin and ibuprofen before surgeries for a reason.

So I’m an idiot.

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