Down at the phlebotomist

With a couple of days off for a long holiday weekend I thought I would head down to the local medical lab for a routine blood draw. Since I didn't need to fast for this particular sample, I thought it would be interesting to forgo the 7am opening by sleeping in for a change and see what it is like to visit fully caffeinated and not being in hypoglycemic shock. I only need to go there about once a year and it is usually in a heavy fasting fog. Big mistake. On the way, I had the privilege of getting behind every geriatric driver in the county who refused to go any faster than 25 MPH. Not surprisingly, the blue-haired little old lady at the head of our five car caravan happened to be going to the same place as me; oh boy. Bless her heart though, it took her nearly ten minutes to park and another ten to make it into the waiting room. And of course the waiting room was packed and to make the experience complete, they share a waiting room with a GP's office next door so I can think of nothing better to do on my day off than to get exposed to every RTI virus currently circulating in the community. What fun!

This particular lab is a one person operation with the phlebotomist covering both the front desk and the lab activities. With no name tag I'll just call her Flo. And of course she knows all the clientele by first name (geriatric and fat-assed diabetic alike) not to mention all of their families names, pet names, housing situation, and didn't you know; "Johnny didn't drive his big truck to work today? I wonder what that means?" I don't know, perhaps he needed to see a man about a horse.

But the really big topic of conversation for today was the ink pen neatly chained to the sign-in clip board. "Please print you name clearly" by the way. You see, it is one of those drug rep pens and writes really well, so well in fact that we can't have it walking away don't you know. "And did you know that the drug reps are not allowed to give away pens any more? Note pads too, you know, the ones with the sticky on the back." "It is all because some doc might be writing a script some day with such a pen, and that evil pen might just make them write it for what ever is displayed right there on the pen. Can you believe that?" I couldn't bear to pop Flo's bubble by mentioning that it really isn't about the stationary but the free trips to Cancun (with or without the man with the horse). Neither could I mention that the same folks who managed to stop the flow of subversive stationary are also the ones who will be directly controlling their health care delivery in the near future. One can only imagine the waiting room conversations after that assuming the place can stay open.

After an hour's wait, Flo finally got to me.