before you start thinking that 'phlebotomizing' has something to do with a bottom with a preference for phlegm as an alternative and extremely deviant form of lubricant, let me reassure you that phlebotomy is far from what it seems. in fact, it's with reference to another bodily fluid and boy, do we have five liters of it to boot. nope, not cum (that would be quite cool though) and not gastric acid (which would also be quite cool; i would spew forth upon all the patient's relatives) either. i'm sure the medical professional knows what the hell i'm talking about when i say that the ancient art of blood-taking - phlebotomy - is an acquired skill. yes, phlebotomy, blood-taking, venepuncture, drawing blood; different names for the same thing.

i may suck at sports and i steer clear of street soccer courts for fear of stray balls coming my way. but give me a 10cc syringe and a 21g needle and i'm as dangerous as a leech with the CIA working undercover as a male staff nurse. that sudden rush of blood that comes when a needle pierces through a vein is what makes me giddy with pride whenever i phlebotomize. the hospital encourages the usage of vacutainer method to draw bloods. however, i'm of the third-world/old school method of patience, precise suctioning and syringes and needles. and this is the point where you can skip and perhaps take a five minute toilet break because i'm beginning to get all technical here. the old school method of syringes and needles is risky as it cause the blood specimens to hemolyze. pulling too hard on the syringe when drawing blood causes the red blood cells to break or hemolyze which results in inaccurate lab test results. which then results in more blood-taking. which then results in irritated patients. which then results in complaints. which then results in me perhaps losing my job.

END OF TECHNICAL BIT or if that wasn't enough for you, you could just wiki the whole bloody thing.

95% of the time though, i'm prolly too good for hemolysis to happen. which is the great bit about blood taking. you can do it any method you want. you can use two needles at the same time to extract blood from a patient. you can cut open the patient's arm and suck out the blood with the syringe and needle. any method you wants, as long as:
1) the patient doesn't mind
2) you get the blood
3) hemolysis doesn't happen

i take great pride in the fact that i'm a rather good shot when it comes to phlebotomy. take today for example, i drew blood from five different people (okay okay, i'm humbly exaggerating; it's more like nine) consecutively without missing a single one. i couldn't help but go giddy with my incessant boasting to all my colleagues when something like that happens. phlebotomy builds up that fragile patient-practitioner relationship in the medical context. when a patient sees a nurse making a successful attempt at blood-taking, he prolly starts thinking 'Wah, this nurse not bah ah! can take blood with minimal pain and with only one try!' he gains confidence and trust in the nurse. which generally leads to much ease when it comes to convincing the patient to make certain medical decisions. i wouldn't be surprise if there were a few patients who would let me deliver their children and their children's children and their children's children's children and etc.

couple my enthusiastic love for phlebotomy and an uber-boring weekend night shift and you have me trying to compete in a blood-taking marathon. i hate the night shift, especially the weekend ones. true, the weekend night shifts pay more and are more relaxing in terms of workload. but the weekend nights are prolly as exciting as watching surgery during my student days. and i'm digressing here. so you could go have that second five minute toilet break. i remember during my operating theater posting of the student nurse days. it was a very boring affair that i commonly thought of as 'as exciting as watching old people going at it'. the student is basically dumped into a designated operating theater to watch and understand the process of a surgery. from scrubbing up to the surgery itself to the important end of counting the total amount of gauzes, cotton swabs and surgical instruments used (this is to prevent malpractice lawsuits in case some ignorant surgeon left his Nokia cell phone behind in the patient's stomach).

of course, the operating theater is a rather small place packed with plenty of people. the anesthetist, the nurses, the doctors, the student doctors, the janitor, more student nurses and perhaps Death himself who lurks in every hospital corridor. it's not like those roomy affairs that you often see in House or Gray's Anatomy. everything is a boring shade of green and everybody seems to be crowding around one main attraction, a patient covered in more layers of green. obviously the patient is only big enough for several of the medical staff to crowd around. and since the student nurses are prolly as useful as that artificial potted plant that stands in your office corridor, it's seldom that they get to see anything else other than the surgeons buttock covered in more green scrub suits. most of the time, i ended up standing at one corner of the operating theater trying to look remotely interested in learning about the size of a doctor's gluts, not that i'm complaining.

and it's not like in the ward where you can go 'Hi, doctor, do you mind me assisting you in (insert random ward procedure?' this is surgery we're talking about where one nervous tic and a nick could cut through an all important artery and result in a spewing of blood the same manner i would do with gastric acid on a not-that-important patient relative. all in all, surgery is boring. and i'm in a fucking surgical ward. which crowns boredom with many crowns.

END OF DIGRESS (and please remember to wash your hands after the toilet).

so what's a nurse to do when he is bored during the weekend night shift? okay, so i smoked a few more extra cigarettes in the assisted toilet and checked my email for blog comments every hour (there were none apparently). but still, that doesn't help with the boredom. so starting from 5am, i commenced with taking all the bloods required for the day. i did nine bloods in the record time of thirty-seven minutes. most of them were easy. some were the tricky 'running vein' sorts that were prominent in people of the older generation. but all in all, i had a great deal of fun doing it. and most importantly, it helped to kill time.

blood-taking is such a sport of concentration that it requires intense focus and precision puncturing. which is perhaps why it helps kill plenty of time. i remember during the reminiscent regimental days of being a medic. i was attached to a medical center to learn more about how it works and the different departments and etc. it was generally boring, except that once in a while, a casualty came in with a bout of physical exhaustion or over-exertion. but generally, people there killed time by indulging in a sport of a different kind: self-phlebotomy.

and i'm not joking about this. i tried it myself and it's not exactly very painful but it puts you in an awkward position of having to keep still and draw your own blood from your very own cubital fossa. not an easy feat when you have several other medics competing to see who can draw 10mls of blood in the fastest possible time. hemolysis was not a factor to be worried about there.
what resulted from this competition was several laughs, several bumps along the arms and twenty push-ups for the slowest self-phlebotomist.

and well here's the last digression that i'm gonna do so you can grab those toilet rolls and start making that sacred trip to the lavatory. Pangkeng and i have our moments of blood-taking. we have our bad days, sure. but we certainly have our good ones too. there is minimal pain involved for the patient, the needles pierces into the vein without piercing through it, the flashback comes as smooth as a really good beer, and there is ample blood to be drawn. on these good days, we can't help but declare ourselves a crude but meaningful term.

we call ourselves Team Tampon. go figure.

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