Skip to main content

At The Phlebotomist

Emily has been suffering from exhaustion to the point where I was becoming concerned that she might be anemic.  She will be standing there talking like a normal person and she will turn white as a sheet and have to go nap for seven or eight hours.  I did the whole "how worried should I be" dance in my head and finally decided to take her to the doctor and have her blood checked.

Emily apparently has my father's tiny veins.  It took two phlebotomists examining both arms to find a vein they could use.  

Because this was in the middle of the day, they asked her if she was glad to be missing school.  She told them she is homeschooled and would still have to finish her schoolwork for the day.

I piped up and told them this was a field trip for her to learn what a phlebotomist does and they looked at me like I was the worst mother on the planet.  It was a joke, people!

All of this resulted in the knowledge that Emily is deficient in Vitamin D which you get from sunshine (we haven't seen the sun in Illinois since November) and milk (which Emily is allergic to).  So now she is taking Vitamin D supplements.

In three months we will take another "field trip" to draw blood again and see if she's perkier (more perky?). 
Labels:

Comments

  1. Hospital JobsMarch 14, 2017 at 10:12 PM

    Thank you for sharing; this is such wonderful information. Keep up the good work guys!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ben's Feet

Ben went camping with his youth group this weekend. He said it was the best weekend he's had since we've been in Hawaii, and possibly in his entire life. The one negative part was that he stepped on some coral out in the water and cut his feet up pretty good. He swears it was all dead coral - you shouldn't touch live coral, much less walk on it because it damages the coral. No one ever mentions that it also damages your feet. They just tell you not to damage the coral. Also, coral is a living organism . If you step on live coral and a tiny piece breaks off in the cut, it will continue to grow. Did you see the movie Alien ? If some creature incubates in Ben's feet, then breaks out and eats us all one night, I'm going to be quite miffed. (Make sure you read the inscription on his tee shirt in this picture. It's quite appropriate.)
Post a Comment
Read more

Mammogram

I'm having my annual mammogram today. I always hear about how painful they are, but honestly, I've never thought they are that bad. Not the most comfortable, but not painful either. Every time I have a mammogram, I'm reminded of this story. It won the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition and I still get a kick out of it every time I read it. So I'm posting it here today for your reading pleasure: Erma Bombeck Writing Competition 1st place in Humor Category Winner Leigh Anne Jasheway of Eugene, Oregon "The First Time's Always the Worst" The first mammogram is the worst. Especially when the machine catches on fire. That's what happened to me. The technician, Gail, positioned me exactly as she wanted me (think a really complicated game of Twister - right hand on the blue, left shoulder on the yellow, right breast as far away as humanly possible from the rest of your body). Then she clamped the machine down so tight, I think my breast actually turned inside o
1 comment
Read more

A Week After Surgery

Katie went back to the surgeon yesterday to have her foot checked.  It was the first time we saw the stitches.  When we saw her after surgery, her foot was already wrapped up in three inches of gauze and it's been wrapped like that ever since. The doctor decided that the sutures were not quite ready to be removed. There are stitches in the side of her foot where they inserted one of the screws.  The surgeon told us that she has to be very, very, very careful not to put her foot on the ground.  Any pressure at all could cause the screws to shift or break and that would be very, very, very bad. They knew we were going out of town for the wedding this weekend.  In order to protect her foot as much as possible, she was put in a hard cast.  It will come back off on Monday so they can check the sutures again.  This cast has a very limited time to be signed! Katie may not get to have a lot of people sign her cast  but she currently still has the initials of the sur
Post a Comment
Read more