A young woman enters my room early this morning to draw labs. Amusing that, even here, some things don’t really change. “Big poke,” she says. She pushes a needle into the soft inside of my right elbow. I hardly feel the bite at all, and don’t move. My arm, like the rest of me, just feels like a dumb piece of meat.
Neither of us speak while blood pulls up into the syringe. A small, strangely intimate moment. “Do you draw labs every day?” I ask finally.
“No.”
“What labs are you drawing for?”
“A1c,” she says, “which is sorta like a diabetes test. And a lipid panel, which is for cholesterol and stuff like that.”
“Oh.”
She presses a cotton ball where she withdraws the needle, tapes over it. She says thank you, and shuts off the overhead light as she leaves. It is about five thirty in the morning. Outside, the sun hasn’t yet risen. The sky is a deep blue-black. My reflection comes visible from the darkness as I go to the window. The part of Main Street I can see from this vantage twinkles with street lights, glowing store signs, the sleepy drifting headlights and tail lights of cars coming and going.
