On Visiting the Vampires

Blood test day again this morning (keeping track of the weight loss stuff), so off I toddle to the Vampire’s Nest to enable them to remove a couple of vials of my ichor.

I arrive and there are five other people in the waiting room – not so bad – and like all kinds of waiting rooms you get the whole warp and weft of humanity and near-humanity (corporate guy pretending he’s not losing his hair; professional-long-term-illness woman; young guy who’s not sure why he’s there, etc). There are also seven staff (aka professional vampires) standing around, talking about lunch plans, very busily not taking blood from anyone in the waiting room. I’m person number six. In theory, there’s a vampire for every girl and boy, with a spare. It should have been a fast, efficient, friendly exchange of lab forms for red stuff. Alas, it was not to be.

You need to keep in mind that I’d endured a fasting blood test – no food since 9pm last night. So no breakfast – and it may only be a small blob of yoghurt in a bowl with a piece of flensed fruit in it, but dammit, it’s my small blob of yoghurt in a bowl with a piece of flensed fruit in it. More importantly in my case, there had been no coffee. This means that on the evolutionary scale I was … well, maybe not even registering. Or I was like the proto-ape creature-thingies in the film Evolution … but with marginally better hair and make-up, and a little more attitude. Civilised behaviour is not necessarily my forte at the best of times – at the “blurst” of times it’s even more challenging. Listening to people not even pretending to cover up the fact that they were not doing their jobs – were in fact standing in the way of me getting on with my day – is very much a strain on my brain.

Eventually, the mood in the waiting room reached critical mass – which makes me wonder if this is what the vampires were waiting for? Does angry blood flow faster from the vein? That subtle shift in the air, the madly flying annoyance electrons that zip around the space above everyone’s heads, creating a high-pitched whining sound only dogs (and presumably vampires) can hear, was obviously the signal. Suddenly in very fast order we were processed … until it got to me. I got the talkative vampire – sweet mother of crap – who wanted to talk about, well, lunch plans, then couldn’t find a vein and stuck a needle in me more times than was necessary. OMG, I got the work experience vampire.

But I did remain polite. No one died. When I finally escaped, I found coffee. I found yoghurt (but no flensed fruit). I found choclit, because it was the only thing that might have made the day better. I must have gotten some broken choclit coz it didn’t work. So I got more choclit – I found choclit patches and stuck them on. I look like Krusty the Clown when they had him on nicotine patches – but, again, I have marginally better hair. And no, the irony of using choclit to recover from a blood test to check on my weight loss progress is not lost on me. Thus began my day.