Orientation (2)

One thing that the USA required all the international students to do is to have a tuberculosis (TB) screening. For the health centre at my school, they use TB Gold blood test instead of X-ray as the TB test.

In my memory, it was my first time to take a blood test. That was definitely a "disaster". The foreigners always think that I am really skinny. On the day, when the nurse pulled up the sleeves of my T-shirt, she immediately said, "Oh gosh! Such a tiny hand!" She then tied my upper arm of my left hand with a rubber band in order to engorge the vein. However, my vein didn't bulge out and the nurse could hardly see the blood vessel. Then she tried with my right arm and it was slightly better. A very small blood vessel appeared. Again, the nurse said, "And such a tiny vein!" Finally she injected the syringe into the really tiny vein. I didn't look at the syringe and I didn't know what was happening until I suddenly felt great pain. I started to wonder if there was something wrong because there was also another student in the same room and I found that her blood was drawn within a few seconds while mine took so much time. I asked the nurse, "Done?" I turned around and the I saw the nurse frowning. She murmured, "I'm sorry, honey... I know that's not nice but your blood has stopped coming out and I only got a few drops...." She started to draw as much as blood as she could as she wanted to prevent me from taking the blood test again. It got really painful and I almost wanted to yell. I ddin't measure the time that the syringe was injected to my vein but I estimated it to be around 30 seconds. I suffered and at the same time, the nurse was having a hard time too. It was worse that I was asked to take the blood test again. I was then taken to the laboratory. The staff of the laboratory let me lie on a very comfortable sofa. This time she could get an adequate amount of blood. Afterwards, she gave me a few kinds of cartoon bandages to choose from. They looked really cute actually but I thought that I was too old to get a bandage with a cartoon character on it. Therefore I answered, "Uh... I think I prefer the normal bandage..." At last, she did give me a normal bandage but she drew a rabbit on it......

My right arm was quite painful throughout the whole day. There was a bruise with two "holes" on it. To some extent, I really looked like a drug addict. I have never imagined that taking blood test is totally an "nightmare" to me.