“He’s a fainter!”

Three little words so quickly emasculate a grown man.

“His hands are cold,” one nurse said.

“He’s gone pale,” said another, the one who seemed to be in charge.  “Okay, we’re calling this off!” And with that, she stripped the rubber tourniquet from Kev’s arm.

“Don’t faint on me, okay?” she said, more of a threat than request.

A third nurse provided a cool washcloth for Kev’s neck and orange juice for some quick energy. “Breathe deeply,” she said, then moved on to other duties, leaving him in the chair in the hallway of the medical center. Another out-patient three chairs down stared at him as if he might spontaneously combust or turn into a chicken. She rolled her eyes and looked away as Kev attempted a weak smile.

He had just stopped in for some routine blood tests – a couple of vials and then on his merry way. Now he’d been escalated to a problem case requiring the attention of the entire nursing staff. Kev was embarrassed. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to look at his arm to inspect the blowout. They were right.

Kev is a fainter.

He sat there, not looking at the other patient, not looking at the blowout, rolling his own eyes at the ceiling, wishing for a window, even to look out on the dreary parking lot, anything to distract him. He pondered this classification, fainter. Ridiculous. A man in his thirties, modestly successful in business and life, to be maligned with such a label. It wasn’t that he had a weak constitution or poor health. I just hate veins, he thought, and shivered a bit at even thinking the word.

He hates anything even related to veins. When his wife, Jess, lightly touches the veins on the back of his hand, it completely wigs him out. And needles!  He can’t watch while giving blood; he isn’t bothered by the pain, it’s the vein. And the blood. His blood.  Outside his body. And IVs are the worst, because the needle has to remain in the vein for an extended period of time.

He would get a little woozy just thinking about this.

That said, today’s simple blood draw seemed inconsequential. Kev had found a way to distract himself while the deed is done. It wasn’t rocket science. More like Zen-inspired misdirection. Meditation-light. Just look away! Go to a happy place. Embrace the minor pinch – there is no blood, no needle, just a pinch! Just a minor pain, like a stubbed toe or a pulled muscle. Some minor inconvenience to endure for a moment and before you know it, you’re all done!

When he got to the lab, Kev confidently exposed his right arm – his good, blood-givin’ arm – then dutifully looked away as the nurse jabbed him with the needle.  Kev was mellow. Kev was Zen. Be one with the pain. Ride the wave like an astral surfer. He took in a deep breath and stared at the fluorescent light, flickering ever so slightly, waiting patiently for her to say “Okay, that’s it!”

Instead, she said, “Uh-oh.” Which is not exactly what you want to hear from a medical professional.  Kev thought that it was the worst thing for a patient in his position to hear.

He was wrong.

In a mild panic, she called another nurse over.  “Why is it swelling like that?” she asked.

See, that’s worse.

The other nurse didn’t seem too concerned, “Oh, that’s just a blowout,” she said.

The rational part of Kev’s brain was sure the term “blowout” is common nursing lingo for something minor, but that part of his brain was being pummeled by his emotional part, currently in a state of near-panic. It did not sound good.  His so-recently-Zen-mind was now flooded with images of exploding forearms. His forearms, to be precise. Exploding.

“How much more blood do we need?” the second nurse asked as she wrapped a tourniquet around Kev’s left arm and started probing for a new vein to tap.

“Three vials,” the first replied. “I only got a little over one from this arm.”

They weren’t talking to Kev, just each other. He was some piece of meat they were carving up. He was in no mood for discussion anyway. The two things that most freak him out in the universe are needles and veins and here he is with two nurses, two needles, two veins and a blowout. His anxiety intensified as he frantically scanned the ceiling, desperately forcing himself not to look down, down where all the action was, between the left-arm probing and the right-arm damage.  The second nurse, the one probing his arm for a vein, abruptly ceased her search and looked Kev in the eye.  “Are you okay?” she asked, suddenly very concerned.

“Uhh, well, yeah…” Kev said. The sudden inclusion of him in the conversation pulled him back from the abyss of self-absorbed terror and shame, to the real world of a few adults having a conversation in a medical center, throwing a virtual damp rag on his raging anxiety attack.

“He’s a fainter!” she yelled out, signaling all nurses in the area to immediately converge on him for maximum humiliation. Kev was stripped of his tourniquet and pride and left with a moist towel and OJ to compose himself.

He recovered for a few minutes. His original nurse, the one surprised by the blowout she’d provided, returned. “Are you ready to proceed?” she asked.

“Sure,” Kev said, trying to maintain the Zen-like calm. But the butcher couldn’t find a vein on his left arm, either. She called over the nurse who seemed to be the senior nurse on call.  As she was probing and probing his arm for a vein (and, yes, freaking him out), two other nurses rushed over in a panic warning, “He’s the fainter!!”

They might as well have declared, “He’s the bed-wetter!!” The blood that everyone was so desperate to access, rushed to his face and burned bright in his cheeks, supplanting the sweat streaked pale green hue.

The probing stopped.  They moved Kev, carefully, to another room with a bed.  There he reclined and extended his left arm again. After a quick review, the senior nurse declared, “That’s it, I’m going in through the hand.”

Good thing he was lying down.

Kev started seeing spots as she secured the tourniquet to his wrist.  That hurt. As he closed his eyes to the world swimming before him, he heard footsteps running.  Kev opened one eye to see the nurse running out of the door then quickly returning with a big needle in one hand and something dangling in the other, like a giant vein.

Kev fainted.

The vial of ammonia-smelling horridness used to revive him was a virtual slap extending from his nasal cavity to the crown of his skull. He shook his head back and forth like a dog dislodging a snout full of water and tried to exhale the nastiness.

“You better now?” asked one of the nurses, very serious as she checked the dilation of his pupils.

“Well, I am a fainter,” Kev shrugged, trying to lightened the mood.

“Lie there for as long as you need,” she said. After about fifteen minutes, Kev slowly swung his feet to the floor and tested his sea legs. Everything seemed in order, so he shuffled down the hall to the main lobby and wisely collapsed in a big comfy chair for another few minutes before heading out to his car.

That night at home, Kev stared at the bandage on his right arm afraid of what horror lay beneath. Jess’s college roommate is now a surgical technician, they call her whenever they have a medical question. “A blowout?” she repeated back to Kev over the phone. “Oh, sure. That’s when someone’s taking blood or inserting an IV and the needle goes in too far. It passes through the backside of the vein. Kinda scary looking, but not a big deal. Basically the sign of bad needlework.”

Wincing at the mental image, Kev thanked her and hung up the phone. His arm ached.

Relieved that ultimately it was no big deal, no matter how bad it looked, he sat comfortably on the couch – just in case – and prepared to remove the bandage. Carefully peeling back the Band-Aid and cotton revealed a nasty, yellowish-green bruise about four inches long and two inches wide on the inside of his forearm.

Kev sneered a little in disgust, then shrugged. Nothing really to faint about.

But he did anyway.