Drawing Blood
Today was the first time in a long time that I volunteered in one of Stanford’s free clinic. Wanting more practice with hypodermics, I signed up for the phlebotomy and vaccination stations. The clinic was down in San Jose, and few of my patients spoke anything other the Vietnamese or Chinese. Somehow not being able to communicate with a stranger makes it easier to stick a needle into him or her.
Making it easier still was the large volume: I stopped counting blood draws at ten, vaccinations at fifteen. An incoming first year student shadowed me for a while and confessed that it was frightening to watch the procedures and imagine performing them. Certainly I remember feeling that same anxiety a year ago, but that “year ago” seems unnaturally distant, as if it were someone else who was nervous about veinupuncture. Certainly I expected medical training to make me more callous. How else can caretakers cope with seeing and performing such upsetting things? But what I did not expect was how insidious the desensitization occurs, how quickly drawing blood becomes mundane.
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