Winnie the Poo. Eats human flesh and snorts coke

I discovered a reason why you should skip the true versions of fairy tales and go for the Dinsneyized version:
m: "Mommy, I want to sing you a song about the Little Mermaid."
M: "Okay."
m (singing sweetly): "Ariel's song, Ariel's song....a sea witch cut out her tongue."

Oops!

You'd be surprised how gruesome some fairy tales are before they were censored. In Cinderella, her step sisters cut theirs toes off in order to fit into the shoes. the transparentness of the glass slippers were easy to spot the ruse. Later at Cinderella's wedding. Birds swooped down and pecked out their eyes.

Hansel and Gretel. They weren't lost in the woods. Their parent's couldn't feed them and stuck them out there!

Rumpelstiltskin. When his name is said, his body splits in half!

Winnie the Poo. Eats human flesh and snorts coke!

The Bible. Daughters get Abraham drunk so they could rape him and have his baby!

Okay, the Winnie the Poo bit wasn't real. But you get the picture. I always heard that the purpose of fairy tales was to help kids deal with fear. Nowadays, all you have to do is turn on the TV and wait for the words: "Today, the president said..."

Every day, after M reads them some books. I usually tell them a vocal version of a story. The top three request are always, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Pinocchio. I got a laugh-out loud review from z when I did Beauty and the Beast. I played Belle as a take no shit, dame who sets the beast straight: "You want me to bring you some food? Motherfucker, I'll slam your ugly-ass face into some dough and make you a batch of gorilla cookies!"
Okay, perhaps not that tough, but she does make him say please.

Speaking of slam. Silly me, I thought once all of those weeks of homework and test were over, The actual sticking and poking part would be easy. It got different and harder. It's one thing to worry about failing a test. It's another thing to think about sticking a needle into a class mate or the teacher without hurting them. By my calculations I logged in about 100 sticks on the fake dummy arms and poked at least 20 times on real people and got poked and stuck at least 20. The worst ones were the hand sticks. Not the finger poke kind which are actually painless with some new click and poke devices, but the venipunctures in area behind your knuckles. I made some stupid mistake, not dangerous ones, thank goodness but ones where I had the vein, I was in there and then I let the needle pull out. That happened at least two times.

The dangerous mistakes would have to go to the two Indian people in our class. Mind you, I have nothing against Indian people. Love the culture; blah blah blah. But these two people just happen to be Indian, right out of India. I was rooting for them because they pretty much failed all of the academic test we had and the teacher really wanted to help them. I could always see the look of pain on her face whenever they wouldn't do their homework or fail a test. When we went from classroom to lab. Their mistakes weren't just bad students. They were dangerous. It finally hit me what the teacher was talking about when she said her job was to make us safe. She wasn't talking about keeping the cootie needles from poking us. She was basically saying that if someone takes your blood, the right way, they are a trained phlebotomist but, if you had a real bad one, or someone that severs a nerve, paralyzing an arm , they are weapons! The woman seemed like she could not speak English. Which is odd for someone trying to get a job in an American hospital: where people yell out: "I need a CD4 a Alpha-fetoprotein and a ABSAG, Stat!"
The Indian guy actually did a finger stick on me and it was perfect. Okay, I thought, this is his time to shine, to show everybody in class that he may not do well in the book part but in the lab he was going to be the mac daddy. Even the Indian woman did well on her venipuncture that day. Then came the day we still talk about. When she was pulling out of this guys arm, instead of pulling straight out, she pulls ...upwards! Ouch. Luckily the guy's arm seems fine. On another student. The teacher told her to pull out because the student was in pain or something. This request was repeated at least two more times while the needle was still in! When the teacher asked: "Didn't you realize you were hurting her?" The Indian woman smiled with this weird vapid look on her face and nodded yes. It was soooo creepy. The guys day of infamy started when he came in, hopped up on coffee (or worst). At one point, he was so excited and weird acting, the teacher actually asked him, 1/4 joking: "What's wrong with you?" Later when he was suppose to stick the teacher, Which, strangely enough in spite of her large size and fat arms, I find her the easiest person in class to hit. She has nice big surface veins. So you just poke a little and bam! You got her. Instead of poking a little, he jabs that needle in like he was trying to thresh a chicken. The teacher yells– ouch! Which I had never heard her say to anyone. She makes him pull out and asked him why did he do that. Basically when you poke someone, you are suppose to feel in your hand something called a "pop" Not a real pop per say. Put a texture change from tissue to vein. Once you feel it, that's when you stop the needle from going pass it. He went pass it, through the other side and right to a nerve. Needless to say when I came back from lunch break, neither the guy or girl were there anymore. After the first test, I got more and more comfortable. By the last test I felt like that horrible nervous butterfly feeling had left completely. It was the first time I actually felt that maybe I can do this.

Next week is the real test. Three weeks in a real clinic. I was suppose to go to Oakland but the women that interviewed me, thought I'd be too timed to work there. Apparently the clients in Oakland are old and angry and wouldn't put up with some bright eyed eager to please Bambi phlebotomist. Not just the patients, but from what the head woman said, or tried not to say but there's no other way to say it; the employees in the Oakland clinic are assholes.

The teacher switched me to another location out in suburbia that's more student friendly. Just as well. the last thing I want to do is spend all day trying to stick some angry old fart who has one foot in the grave and the other one up my ass while an employee yells :"Hurry up, bitch, I got's other people to stick!"

I actually discovered that my teacher intentionally switched my location with the streetwise-mother suer. She actually sent her to a suburban clinc while trying to send me to the belly of the beast, Oakland. I guess as some kind of "learning experience." Perhaps she thought Oakland would toughen me up. And for her, stop her from saying "Muthafuck'a and suing her parents. My teacher really reminds me of those teachers you see in Shaw Brother kung-fu movies from the 70's. You know where a young Jackie Chan (before his nose job. that's right, you heard me) gets his ass kicked by the bad-ass guy with long white hair and beard. He then gets trained by that one crazy/drunk master who it turns out use to be a super bad-ass back in the day. He makes Jackie do all kind of stupid exercises like carry a sack of boulders across a river, while the master sits on the shore, eating a fish head on a stick and smoking opium. That's pretty much my teacher. You may think she's crazy but then you discover she has mad skills and should pay attention to her.

Even when she sits on my back and makes me do push ups over 80 upturned hypodermic needles.

That's it
E.M

Phlebotomy phisting

The girls continue to fight us (mostly me) on anything I want them to do. At the current rate, we may have to put them on an 18 year-long time out.

I made the mistake of showing them a part of The Wizard of OZ.
I tried to show them a witch-free version, to prevent the nightmares and it worked for a while. If there were any shots of green face that I could remember, I would skip to the next scene. I forgot about the one scene when they meet the Tin Man under the mean apple trees. For only a split second, the witch appears and hides behind a tree. For just that one second, the girls forgot all about the rest of the movie and any songs that they had heard. All they want to do is talk about is the "Green Witch." this and "the Green Witch" that.
Big "M" was so mad at me.

This week, I got to see what life is like when you only have one class to work with. It's still hard but at least I can focus on one subject. I also got to know a little bit more about my classmates. Apparently, you are suppose to really get to know the people in your class in Phlebotomy, Why, BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO PRACTICE ON EACH OTHER!. Did you know that? I didn't. That's right. In Phlebotomy you have to practice your needle techniques on each other! We learned this during orientation and there was a collective what-the-fuck? look on all of our faces. It makes since tough. You are choosing a career where you are going to be drawing blood out of an average of 40-100 people per day. Do you really want to be treating them the same way you treat a rubber arm you were sticking during class? The same one used for the 5:30 fisting class?

The teacher Miss Hardass is also a person you are going to have to stick eventually. There are 16 people in our class. Who the hell voluntarily takes a job were every week you get 16 needle sticks? I'm guessing either she's just really dedicated to her job of teaching OR in her spare time, she dresses up in leather, has a iron maiden in her bedroom and steals the fake rubber arms for god knows what. I decided that the former is true.
She really does know her stuff. She started us off with finger sticks. Finger sticks are a lot different than I remember. I remember they would use a sharp piece of metal– probably the same one washed over and over , and they would shove that mother fucker right into your finger, as close to your nail bed as they could get, sorta like listening to Bush giving a speech. The new finger sticks are all automated and spring loaded and you literally don't feel them when they puncture you. This was the first lesson in sticking each other. I think I did good on the girl I was assigned to but it took me 3 days to heal from hers. The next class we got to do venipunctures on the rubber arms: "Hey? Why does my smell like K-Y jelly?" I asked. "Shut your cake-hole, and use it!" the teacher growled at me.
I was teamed up with this one guy who complains more than that guy I once gutted like a fish dwhen I worked for the Yakuza. I understand that he's working overtime at his job and has to do 8 hours of class and then 8 hours of homework, but we're all sucking it up. I was also teamed up with this girl who sued her own mother for $3,000 dollars. On top of that, she did it on one of those TV court shows!! That's right, not only did she have the gaul to sue her own mom (and won) but she went on national TV and did it. Strangely enough I kinda remember her on the show and get this: It was a special "Mother's day" episode. Needless to say, if someone sues their own mother, what hope do you have that they're going to be nice to you? When it was her turn to stick the arm and draw blood from it, she made it look easy. I guess she's use to draining blood. The next guy made one mistake but then he got it right. When It was my time, I was like captain fuck-up of the SS Inept. I couldn't find the vein if it was outside the body with a note that said :"Vein. Put needle in this." While the teacher was getting frustrated with my mangling her favorite rubber arm, Miss Mothersuer is harping on me with such encouraging things as: "Dang! don't you know how to tie your shoe?" or "He's taking up so much time that (the guy who has the job problem) can't get his turn in." Basically I sucked ass that day. It's very stressful because It's a terrifying thought of fucking up like that on a real person. I had no idea that there was so much to giving somebody a shot. There's hand positioning, pressure. sanitation, did you know that when they snap on those collection tubes, they have to go in a certain order or else the test would be ruined? It's called the order of draw. And each tube may have a different substance in it to make the blood do something different. Do them in the wrong order and you could cause cross contamination.
I did learn that if they are taking your blood with a red cap tube, they use that one to test for, among many other things, alcohol. Maybe they should call those test tubes "shot" glasses.

Here is a picture of the patron saint of phlebotomy, coming to kick my ass because of that horrible pun.











That's it
EM