[8] I Feel a Little Faint
I would have to have a blood test, the Doctor said. She probably said it because my Dad was in the room, and he made a point of telling her he had worked in a hospital for forty years. He’s not one to throw his weight around, my Dad, but having spent two weeks looking after me he knew something was wrong and he wasn’t going to let this Doctor tell us otherwise.
I’d never had a blood test before. I’d had vaccinations at
school, and been put under general anaesthetic when I had shoulder surgery, but
I’d never sat there while someone took my blood. I wasn’t scared, if anything,
I was quite intrigued. I didn’t realise I would bob up and down in such an
unseaworthy fashion before finally capsizing with a thud on to the floor.
‘I feel a little faint’, I told Sandra, the big nurse who’d about
finished collecting the second bottle of blood. I slumped back on my chair, hit
my head against the wall, and then fell forward with all my weight and not even
big Sandra could stop me from flopping off the chair and landing in a heap on
the cold vinyl floor. She did manage to whip the needle out of my arm as I
wilted, and I remember thinking how that must have taken some serious skill.
It wasn’t the sight of the needle, or the little vials
slowly filling up with my blood, and it can’t have been the actual loss of
blood; Sandra said I would lose a teaspoonful at the very most; I think it was
the physical feeling, the very mild annoyance and discomfort of something
sticking in to my arm where things didn’t normally stick. It didn’t even hurt,
I was just aware of it in my arm, and I didn’t like it, so I fainted.
I woke up after I don’t know how long – seconds probably,
maybe a minute at most. I was covered in sweat and big Sandra, was peering at
me through small half-moon shaped glasses perched on the end of her nose. I
remember wondering where I was and thinking she was a librarian. She offered me
a biscuit and a glass of water and I apologised profusely. It was fine, she
said, but it always happened to the fully grown men; never the ladies.
Anyway, the results of the blood test came and everything
was fine. Absolutely everything was fine. Red blood cells, white blood cells,
polka dot blood cells. All fine. I wasn’t diabetic, or anaemic. I didn’t have
Addison’s disease. Citing these results, the Doctor refused to sign me off work
again and told me to get up and get on with it. Not once did she mention
anything about anxiety, or panic attacks, or low-mood, depression, or whatever
you want to call it. I suppose looking back it’s quite apparent what was
happening to me. But the Doctor never mentioned any of those words. Everything
I know now points to all of those unused words. But at the time I couldn’t
think straight enough to understand it, and the Doctor was totally useless.
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